Beckett and/in Context: A Review of James McNaughton's Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath

Abstract

Abstract: Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath presents a historicist and materialist analysis of Samuel Beckett's work. Building on the historicist turn in modernist studies, as well as Irish studies and postcolonial paradigms, it develops new terms through which we can understand Beckett's political aesthetic. McNaughton performs a series of close readings of the Beckett archive and corpus to reveal a politically aware and committed Beckett, one whose writing is both complicit with and reacting against the political ideologies and failures of his time.