Samuel Beckett and Recent Irish Fiction

A Comparative Study

David McKinney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032468907
• eBook ISBN: 9781040269183
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume considers Samuel Beckett's fiction and drama as major aesthetic and thematic influences on the work of Irish authors Eimear McBride, Keith Ridgway, Emma Donoghue, and Kevin Barry in the post-crash period of 2009–2015. Through cross-comparisons between the aesthetics and form of Beckett's Trilogy, Mercier and Camier, Footfalls and Not I, and those of a range of post-crash Irish novels including Beatlebone, Hawthorn and Child, Room, and A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, this book establishes Beckett's continuing influence on Irish fiction. With particular reference to these newer authors' treatment of scarcity, trauma, indeterminism, gender and sexuality, and confinement in the context of major societal changes and traumas in Irish society since 2009, topics include the imposition of austerity, collapse of faith in institutions, and the increasing recognition of LGBTQIA+ and reproductive rights.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Beckett’s Ghost and Shadow in the Twenty-First Century
• 1 Molloy’s Haunting of Emma Donoghue’s Room
• 2 Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone (2015) and Malone Dies (1951)
• 3 Keith Ridgway’s Hawthorn and Child and Mercier and Camier
• 4 The Feminized Beckettian Aesthetic in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: Beckett and Ireland Since 2016
• Works Cited
• Index