When Martin Esslin published The Theatre of the Absurd in 1961 he caught the pulse of Western drama as it burst into bold and surprising new forms after the Second World War. Around the Absurd is the first book to examine the history, impact, and legacy of that theater. In provocative essays by leading critics from both sides of the Atlantic (including Jan Kott, Herbert Blau, Katharine Worth, Theodore Shank, and Benedict Nightingale), this forum carries forward Esslin's seminal work by sur...

This book examines dramatic dialogue in English-language theatre, tracing verbal invention across four centuries from Shakespeare and Restoration comedy right up to contemporary English and American theatre.Published posthumously, this renowned theatre scholar's book considers English dramatic dialogue as exemplified in the verbal invention of particular plays. That invention is traced through puns, repetitions, adroit clichés, occasional neologisms, malapropisms, ...

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[Beckett] is a serious writer with something serious to say about the human condition: and therefore one of the dozen or so writers those who are concerned with modern man in search of his soul should read.”-Stephen Spender, The New York TimesRenowned Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn has selected some of Beckett's criticisms, reviews, letters, and other unpublished materials that shed new light on his work.

Samuel Beckett is unique in literature. Born and educated in Ireland, he lived most of his life in Paris. His literary output was rendered in either English or French, and he often translated one to the other, but there is disagreement about the contents of his bilingual corpus. A Beckett Canon by renowned theater scholar Ruby Cohn offers an invaluable guide to the entire corpus, commenting on Beckett's work in its original language.Beginning in 1929 with Beckett's earlies...

“On Beckett: Essays and Criticism” is the first collection of writings about the Nobel Prize–winning author that covers the entire spectrum of his work, and also affords a rare glimpse of the private Beckett.More has been written about Samuel Beckett than about any other writer of this century – countless books and articles dealing with him are in print, and the progression continues geometrically. “On Beckett” brings together some of the most perceptive writings from the vast amou...

The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards and prostitutes amid the debris of factories and poorhouses. In love poems such as 'Le Beau Navire', flights of lyricism entwine with languorous eroticism, while prose poems such as 'La Chambre Double' deal with the agonies of artistic creat...

In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understan...

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. The more sophisticated characters find it natural to speak in quotations. Proust made literary taste a means of defining personalities and gave literature an actual role to play in his novels.In this wonderfully entertaining book, scholar and biographer Anka Muhls...

Linda Hutcheon, in this original study, examines the modes, forms and techniques of narcissistic fiction, that is, fiction which includes within itself some sort of commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic nature. Her analysis is further extended to discuss the implications of such a development for both the theory of the novel and reading theory.Having placed this phenomenon in its historical context Linda Hutcheon uses the insights of various reader-response theories to ...

Helene Cixous is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant and innovative contemporary thinkers. Published here in English for the first time Helene Cixous, Rootprints is an ideal introduction to Cixous's theory and her fiction, tracing her development as a writer and intellectual whose remarkable prespicacity and electrifying poetic force are known world-wide.Unprecedented in its form and content this collection breaks new ground in the theory and practice of auto/biography. C...

From A to Z, an indispensable guide to the works, life, and thought of one of the most important writers of our timeThe Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett is the most comprehensive reference to the concepts, characters, and biographical details mentioned by, or related to, the Nobel Prize–winning author Samuel Beckett. Painstakingly and lovingly compiled by acclaimed Beckett scholars C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski, it is alphabetical, cross-referenced, ...