This thesis focuses on three plays written by Samuel Beckett: Play, Not I and Footfalls. Corporeality is the central theme of these works, which also connects them to an important and celebrated source of study and inspiration for the dramatist, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri. The influence played by Dante's descriptions of the body, particularly in the cantica of Inferno, is visible in Beckett's works for the ways in which the organs of perception and expression are treated at both textual and theatrical level. In the three plays the activities of mouth, eyes, ears (and less relevantly, nose) constitute the narrative focus of the text, while the sensorial aspects derived by their presence on stage determine the kind of exchange at play between actors and spectators. Staging immobilized, constricted and barely visible characters who, narrating obscure, uncertain stories, obsessively try to make a sense of their existential and physical conditions, the author gives life to a metatheatrical language rooted on instability and doubt. After the introductory opening chapter, the second chapter looks at the language of Dante's Inferno and at its thematization of corporeality, introducing the continuities between the poem and Beckett's drama. The third chapter juxtaposes the characters and the uncertain...

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Excerpt: Beckett is keenly interested in ways individuals unsuccesfully atempt to disown their past. His explorations into this reflect his awareness of being a survivor of the Second World War.

This volume comprises ten essays challenging the dominant account of Samuel Beckett’s engagement with history. As the first full-length volume to address the historical debate in Beckett studies, Samuel Beckett: History, Memory, Archive provides both ground-breaking analysis of the major works as well as a sustained interrogation of the critical assumptions that underpin Beckett studies more generally. Drawing on a range of archival materials, and situating Beckett in historical context, these essays pose a strong challenge to the prevailing critical consensus that he was a deracinated modernist who cannot be read historically. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1185/thumbnail.jpg

Review of Samuel Beckett’s Plays on Film and Television by Graley Herren.

Review of A Companion to Samuel Beckett edited by S.E. Gontarski.

Review of John Bolin, Beckett and the Modern Novel. Cambridge: University Press, 2013. Hardcover. xii+214. ISBN 978-1107029842. £50.0.

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