Samuel Beckett and Medicine

Advances an analysis of Beckett's abiding interest in medicine and its impact on the form and content of his work.

Ulrika Maude (Author)

9781108840736, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 July 2025

222 pages
23.5 x 16 x 1.7 cm, 0.46 kg

'… brilliant … the sheer ambition of this media- and career-spanning study enables new insight into Beckett's oeuvre.' James Little, English Studies

Samuel Beckett and Medicine offers the first sustained analysis of the author's abiding interest in medicine and medical discourses, advancing insights into the representation of illness, neurodiversity, disability, ageing, and dying in his work. It analyses Beckett's representation of the production of language, offering new ways of understanding the often perplexing formal and stylistic experimentation of his work. The book addresses the many automatic and habitual functions staged in his writing and considers the impact of nerve theory, reflexes, affect, and the viscera on his work. It advances new readings of Beckett's poetry, prose, and television and stage plays, drawing on his reading notes on medicine and psychology, and on his correspondence and critical writings. Through its refusal to aestheticize embodied experience or to yield to the metaphysical consolations of literature, Beckett's work challenges us to confront the intricacies of embodied being and to encounter the question of finitude.

Introduction: Beckett's medical imagination
1. Poetry, illness and medicine
2. Chronic conditions: Keats, Johnson and Beckett
3. Convulsive aesthetics: Charcot, Chaplin and Gilles de la Tourette
4. Nerve theory, conditioned reflex and literary form
5. Writing viscera: Beckett's inhuman domain
6. 'Temporarily sane': Beckett and Modernist suicide
7. Beckett's affective telepoetics
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]