A collection of original essays by a team of leading Beckett scholars and two of his biographers, Companion to Samuel Beckett provides a comprehensive critical reappraisal of the literary works of Samuel Beckett. Builds on the resurgence of international Beckett scholarship since the centenary of his birth, and reflects the wealth of newly released archival sources. Informed by the latest in scholarly, critical, and theoretical debates. A valuable addition to contemporary Beckett scholarship, and testament to the enduring influence of Beckett's work and his position as one of the most important literary figures of our time.

Table of Contents

• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction - S. E. Gontarski
• Part I A Life in Letters
• 1 A Writer’s Homes – A Writer’s Life - James Knowlson
• 2 Within a Budding Grove: Publishing Beckett in America - S. E. Gontarski
• 3 Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot - Lois Gordon
• 4 Beginning to End: Publishing and Producing Beckett - Barney Rosset
• Part II Charting Territories
• 5 A Critique of Aesthetic Judgment: Beckett’s “Dissonance of Ends and Means” - John Pilling
• 6 The Legacy of Samuel Beckett: An Anatomy - H. Porter Abbott
• 7 Beckett and Philosophy - Anthony Uhlmann
• 8 Philosophizing with Beckett: Adorno and Badiou - Jean-Michel Rabaté
• 9 Beckett and Ethics - Shane Weller
• 10 Beckett and Germany in the 1930s: The Development of a Poetics - Mark Nixon
• 11 Samuel Beckett and Science - C. J. Ackerley
• 12 A Purgatorial Calculus: Beckett’s Mathematics in “Quad” - Brett Stevens
• 13 Beckett and Obsessional Ireland - David Pattie
• 14 Beckett in French and English - Sinéad Mooney
• Part III Acts of Fiction
• 15 Beckett the Poet - Marjorie Perloff
• 16 The “Dream” Poems: Poems in Personae - Sean Lawlor
• 17 Figures of Script: The Development of Beckett’s Short Prose and the “Aesthetic of Inaudibilities” - Dirk Van Hulle
• 18 Molloy, or Life without a Chambermaid - Patrick A. McCarthy
• 19 Malone Dies: Postmodernist Masculinity - Susan Mooney
• 20 “The Knowing Non-Exister”: Thirteen Ways of Reading Texts for Nothing - S. E. Gontarski; C. J. Ackerley
• 21 What We Are Given to Mean: Endgame - Paul Shields
• 22 “In the Old Style,” Yet Anew: Happy Days in the “AfterBeckett” - William Hutchings
• Part IV Acts of Performance
• 23 Beckett’s Production of Waiting for Godot (Warten auf Godot) - David Bradby
• 24 The Seated Figure on Beckett’s Stage - Enoch Brater
• 25 Clowning with Beckett - Mary Bryden
• 26 “Down, all going down …”: The Spiral Structure of Beckett’s Theater - Xerxes Mehta
• 27 Beckett on Television - Graley Herren
• 28 Staging Beckett in Spain: Theater and Politics - Antonia Rodríguez-Gago