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The dozen essays brought together here, alongside a newly-written introduction, contextualize and exemplify the recent "empirical turn" in Beckett studies. Characterized, above all, by recourse to manuscript materials in constructing revisionist interpretations, this approach has helped to transform the study of Samuel Beckett over the past generation. In addition to focusing upon Beckett`s early immersion in philosophy and psychology, other chapters similarly analyze his later collaboration with the BBC through the lens of literary history. Falsifying Beckett thus offers new readings of Beckett by returning to his archive of notebooks, letters, and drafts. In reassessing key aspects of his development as one of the 20th century`s leading artists, this collection is of interest to all students of Beckett's writing as well as "historicist" scholars and critics of modernism more generally.
About the author
Dr Matthew Feldman is a Reader in Contemporary History at Teesside University, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway, and a Senior Researcher with the Cantemir Institute, University of Oxford. Dr Paul Jackson is co-editor of Wiley-Blackwell's online journal Compass: Political Religions, an editor of the Mapping the Far Right book series, and an Associate Editor of the Historicising Modernism book series.
Report
Matthew Feldman has been one of the leading Beckett scholars of the past generation. These essays cumulatively testify to the standards he has set for empirical and archival research in this field. That we now speak of the "grey canon"- the archive of notebooks and unpublished papers that have transformed our understanding of Beckett`s debts and influences - is in no small part due to Feldman`s ground-breaking interventions. - Rónán McDonald, Director of the Global Irish Studies Centre at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
