Samuel Beckett and The Bible

From Waiting for Godot to such later novels as Ill Seen, Ill Said , the work of Samuel Beckett is filled with Biblical references. Samuel Beckett and the Bible re-appraises the relationships between Beckett''s work and the Bible, exploring both as objects of history, matter and memory. Iain Bailey ranges across the Beckett oeuvre to examine how the Bible has come to be regarded as a book of unique significance in his work, offering innovative readings of intertextuality and influence in both published and archival writings. Beckett''s Bibles, the book demonstrates, are thoroughly material, as significant for their involvement in histories of education, the family, common knowledge and canon-formation as for what they have to say about God, hope and salvation. The book explores Beckett''s uneasy forms of memory, materiality, language and history to assess how far and in what ways the Bible matters in his work, and why Beckett''s voice ''harps, but no worse than Holy Writ.''>

About the author

Iain Bailey is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK.

Product details

• Authors: Iain Bailey
• Assisted by: Matthew Feldman (Editor), Erik Tonning (Editor)
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.07.2015
• EAN: 9781474250252
• ISBN: 978-1-4742-5025-2
• No. of pages: 208
• Series: Historicizing Modernism; Historicizing Modernism
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; LITERARY CRITICISM / General, RELIGION / Christianity / General, RELIGION / Biblical Studies / General, Christianity, 20th century, c 1900 to c 1999, Literary studies: general, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Criticism and exegesis of sacred texts