Overview

Confinement appears repeatedly in Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre – from the asylums central to Murphy and Watt to the images of confinement that shape plays such as Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Drawing on spatial theory and new archival research, Beckett in Confinement explores these recurring concepts of closed space to cast new light on the ethical and political dimensions of Beckett’s work. Covering the full range of Beckett’s writing career, including two plays he completed for prisoners, Catastrophe and the unpublished ‘Mongrel Mime’, the book shows how this engagement with the ethics of representing prisons and asylums stands at the heart of Beckett’s poetics. ""James Little’s Beckett in Confinement offers a brilliant analysis of the politics behind Beckett’s production of closed space, both as a writer and as a director. It carefully examines the move from writing about closed space to creating an art of confinement. To argue that Beckett’s use of confined space is central to the political dynamics of his works, James Little also superbly employs genetic criticism to open up the confined space of the published text and bring highly relevant draft materials back into the critical conversation."" Dirk Van Hulle, Professor of Bibliography and Modern Book History, University of Oxford, UK ""The many characters Beckett invented share one characteristic: they are all imprisoned or trapped in some way, no matter where they are. Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space draws on untapped riches from Beckett’s correspondence and the archives to reconsider the obsession with entrapment, coercion and detention central to Beckett’s varied oeuvre. In this exciting and illuminating analysis, James Little offers a fresh and original reading of the work’s ethical and political dimensions, and shows us why we need to stop thinking about confinement as a metaphysical metaphor."" Emilie Morin, Professor of Modern Literature, University of York, UK ""Little breaks new ground in this expansive investigation to explore how confinement is a central component of Beckett’s political aesthetics … The reader is guided by a crisp and easy style of writing as Little demonstrates a command of sources which are broad in scope, but negotiated to form a compelling and impactful study."" Journal of Beckett Studies

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9781350112322

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Reviews

Little joins the growing list of scholars and readers recalibrating what we might broadly call Beckett's politics as the historical arc of Beckett criticism shifts from seeing Beckett as a disengaged aesthete to something of a political philosopher. Joining these, Little takes a fresh approach to such issues as he returns to the famous confined spaces of Beckett's texts in more broadly philosophical and political terms, shifting the calculus from restriction and confinement as an imaginative resource to the principle of coercive confinement in prose and on stage, confinements often extended beyond the seeable. Space itself is explored as a political issue. Amid a crowded field of Beckett scholarship, such recalibrations are most welcome. * S. E. Gontarski, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Florida State University, USA *

Little joins the growing list of scholars and readers recalibrating what we might broadly call Beckett's politics as the historical arc of Beckett criticism shifts from seeing Beckett as a disengaged aesthete to something of a political philosopher. Joining these, Little takes a fresh approach to such issues as he returns to the famous confined spaces of Beckett's texts in more broadly philosophical and political terms, shifting the calculus from restriction and confinement as an imaginative resource to the principle of coercive confinement in prose and on stage, confinements often extended beyond the seeable. Space itself is explored as a political issue. Amid a crowded field of Beckett scholarship, such recalibrations are most welcome. * S. E. Gontarski, Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English, Florida State University, USA * The many characters Beckett invented share one characteristic: they are all imprisoned or trapped in some way, no matter where they are. Samuel Beckett in Confinement: The Politics of Closed Space draws on untapped riches from Beckett's correspondence and the archives to reconsider the obsession with entrapment, coercion and detention central to Beckett's varied oeuvre. In this exciting and illuminating analysis, James Little offers a fresh and original reading of the work's ethical and political dimensions, and shows us why we need to stop thinking about confinement as a metaphysical metaphor. * Emilie Morin, Professor of Modern Literature, University of York *

Author Information

James Little is a postdoctoral researcher at Charles University, Prague and Visiting Professor at Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.

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