Samuel Beckett and The Bible

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From Waiting for Godot to such later novels as Ill Seen, Ill Said, the work of Samuel Beckett is filled with Biblical references. Samuel Beckett and the Bible re-appraises the relationships between Beckett's work and the Bible, exploring both as objects of history, matter and memory. Iain Bailey ranges across the Beckett oeuvre to examine how the Bible has come to be regarded as a book of unique significance in his work, offering innovative readings of intertextuality and influence in both published and archival writings. Beckett's Bibles, the book demonstrates, are thoroughly material, as significant for their involvement in histories of education, the family, common knowledge and canon-formation as for what they have to say about God, hope and salvation. The book explores Beckett's uneasy forms of memory, materiality, language and history to assess how far and in what ways the Bible matters in his work, and why Beckett's voice harps, but no worse than Holy Writ.'

Reviews

With extraordinary acumen, precision and eloquence, Iain Bailey examines how Beckett interrogates the terrible materiality of the word surface and what it means for parts of this bilingual interrogation to count as biblical. Baileys brilliant book on Beckett and the Bible is a sophisticated plea for an approach to intertextuality that does not limit itself to phrase-hunting, as it were, but that consists of a subtle negotiation between texts and contexts, taking full account of ideological fluctuations and historical contingencies. * Dirk Van Hulle, Professor of English Literature at the University of Antwerp *
[T]he many merits of the book lie chiefly in the many delicately-formulated readings of discrete passages of the Bible in Beckett Bailey provides deft close readings of the Watt manuscripts in particular. * Breac: A Digital Journal of Irish Studies *
Critiquing naively historicist or biographical interpretations of Beckett's Bible, Bailey deploys a broadly genetic and intertextual approach to the Beckett archive ... As a pervasive and productive cultural force at the time of writing, the Bible's influence suffuses many inexplicit elements of Beckett, he claims. By bringing those energies to light with archival methods, Bailey also helps to illuminate those tacit cultural influences explored by Beckett at the time of writing. * The Year's Work in English Studies *

Author Bio

Iain Bailey is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK.