Beckett before Godot

A leading Beckett scholar and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Beckett, offers a coherent critical account of Beckett's earliest years.

John Pilling (Author)

9780521604512, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 29 July 2004

292 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.43 kg

'Beckett Before Godot offers a much needed study of Beckett's 'formative years' from 1929 to 1946 … Beckett Before Godot demonstrates meticulous scholarship, referring to the MacGreevy correspondence and to Knowlson's biography to provide contexts for the creation of specific works.' Theatre Research International

In Beckett before Godot, John Pilling (editor of the Cambridge Companion to Beckett) re-evaluates the formative years of Beckett between the publication of his first work in 1929 and the composition late in 1946 of The Calmative, his last work before the 'trilogy'. Using a wealth of unpublished manuscripts and correspondence from around the world, Pilling offers a detailed account of Beckett's early psychological and aesthetic development, and shows how his artistic growth was paradoxically linked to the likelihood of failure, to which he was always temperamentally attracted. Pilling's treatment of the first two decades of Beckett's career as a writer offers for the first time a coherent critical narrative of his development during this long period of apprenticeship. Beckett before Godot links biographical fact with a series of powerful close readings to modify and enhance our understanding of one of this century's most influential authors.

1. Introduction
Part I. 1929–1932: 2. Dante ... Bruno ... Vico ... Joyce and Assumption: 'the prospect of self-extension'
3. From a view to a kill: Proust and Le Concentrisme
4. Dream of Fair to Middling Women: 'a solution of continuity'
Part II. 1932–1936: 5. More poems than precipitates: towards Echo's Bones and beyond
6. In the interval: More Pricks Than Kicks
7. Beckett as bookman: the reviews
8. Figure and ground: Murphy
Part III. 1937–1946: 9. Dissonance: 1937–1940
10. Watt and Watt not
11. Texts for something: 'a universe becomes provisional'
12. Mercier et Camier and the nouvelles: 'the vicissitudes of the road'
13. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG]