Samuel Beckett's narrative innovations are among his most important contributions to twentieth-century literature. Yet contemporary Beckett scholarship rarely considers the effect of his literary influences on the evolution of his narrative techniques, focusing instead on Beckett's philosophical implications. In this study, John Bolin challenges the utility of reading Beckett through a narrow philosophical lens, tracing new avenues for understanding Beckett's work – and by extension, the form of the modern novel – by engaging with English, French, German and Russian literature. Presenting new empirical evidence drawn from major archives in the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States, Bolin demonstrates Beckett's preoccupation with what he termed the 'European novel': a lineage running from Sade to Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Gide, Sartre and Celine. Through close readings of Beckett's manuscripts and novels up to and including The Unnamable, Bolin provides a new account of how Beckett's fiction grew out of his changing compositional practice.
• Departs from the great majority of previous studies by revealing the importance of French and Russian literary influences on Beckett's early writing • Presents new and unpublished empirical evidence gathered from every major Beckett archive in the UK, Ireland and the US • Engages with important issues such as the power of emotion in literature, intertextuality and the development of transnational modernism
Contents
Introduction; 1. 'The integrity of incoherence': theory and Dream of Fair to Middling Women; 2. 'An ironical radiance': Murphy and the modern novel; 3. 'The creative consciousness': the Watt notebooks; 4. 'Telling the tale': narrators and narration (1943–1946); 5. Images of the author; 6. 'Oh it's only a diary': Molloy; 7. 'The art of incarceration': Malone Dies; Conclusion: Beckett and the modern novel; Bibliography.
Review
'Powerfully argued, the book is a timely reminder that Beckett was first and foremost a man of 'arts' and only secondly one of 'letters.' Times Higher Education
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