Beckett's Literary Legacies

Abstract

Featuring twelve chapters on a range of novelists, poets and dramatists, Beckett's Literary Legacies is the first volume dedicated to charting the truly global influence of Samuel Beckett upon contemporary literature. To do this, editors Feldman and Nixon have included studies of both internationally recognised authors (Auster, Muldoon, Celan) and lesser-known figures within Anglophone scholarship (Laederach, Mayrocker)-all of whom reveal a demonstrable indebtedness to Beckett's art. With this criteria to hand, case studies, no less than their respective contributors, reflect the international reception of Beckett's revolutionary artistic project: from Japan (Oe), the United States (DeLillo) and South Africa (Coetzee) to France (Blanchot) and Britain (Kane) and, of course, Ireland (Banville). In addition to finding that Beckett's shadow is a long and indeed diffuse one, commentators here also stress the challenge his oeuvre presents to authors writing alongside and after him: reflexivity and literary abstraction, radical stoicism and structural innovation; all of these are recurring themes the 1969 Nobel Laureate has engendered. While the list of 'legacees' is exhaustive and by no means limited to literature, as the only study to date covering this often paradoxical, always fascinating subject, Beckett's Literary Legacies offers a sustained exploration of Samuel Beckett's burgeoning artistic legacy. From the introduction: 'Through wide-ranging example, contributors to this volume have undertaken analyses of Beckett's influence on major international writers, most of whom are still alive and at work forging their own literary legacies. As for Beckett's, the authors surveyed here find that legacy to be both philosophically rich and artistically challenging. And Beckett scholars of similarly global breadth consider Beckett's art to be a truly revolutionary one, pushing at the very boundaries of literature. What follows is the first sustained attempt to gauge the literary impact of that project, [...] for the majority of the critics and their respective case studies here, Beckett's influence represents an apparent schism in the Western literary canon, one perceived to be an artistic challenge no less than a literary liberation from representation-however well-disguised the latter may be.'

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