Samuel Beckett and Cultural Nationalism

This Element reveals the importance of ideas of cultural nationalism in Beckett's writing throughout his writing life.

Shane Weller (Author)

9781009045483, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 June 2021

75 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 0.5 cm, 0.128 kg

Drawing on evidence from his published works, manuscripts, and correspondence, Samuel Beckett and Cultural Nationalism explores Beckett's engagement with the theme of cultural nationalism throughout his writing life, revealing the various ways in which he sought to challenge culturally nationalist conceptions of art and literature, while never embracing a cosmopolitan approach. The Element shows how, in his pre-Second World War writings, Beckett sought openly to mock Irish nationalist ideas of culture and language, but that, in so doing, he failed to avoid what he himself described as a 'clot of prejudices'. In his post-war works in French and English, however, following time spent in Nazi Germany in 1936-7 as well as in the French Resistance during the Second World War, Beckett began to take a new approach to ideas of national-cultural affiliation, at the heart of which was a conception of the human as a citizen of nowhere.

1. Introduction
2. A Nameless and Hideous Mass
3. Displaced Persons
4. Citizens of Nowhere
5. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: plays & playwrights [DSG], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]