Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Samuel Beckett
-
Standard Name: Beckett, Samuel
SB
, Irish expatriate poet, short-story writer, novelist, and playwright, was a major force in international twentieth-century writing and especially theatre. He wrote a high proportion of his works in French, usually doing the translations into English himself. His increasingly death-obsessed absurdity and minimalism are combined with an invincible energy of language, even while the text appears to despair of the efficacy of words.
CBR
wrote criticism and reviews since 1947, often anonymously. Between 1956 and 1968 she freelanced at literary journalism and published on a wide range of topics in diverse journals. For the London Magazine, she...
Her purpose in founding the press was to publish mainly contemporary poetry of an experimental kind. Virginia Woolf
warned her that Your hands will always be covered with ink,
He acted for this company for a year and learned a lot. He worked his way up in Shakespearean
roles from bit parts to major ones and discovered the writings of Samuel Beckett
.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Occupation
Harold Pinter
Always keen on acting, HP
played the solo protagonist of Beckett
's Krapp's Last Tape in a wheelchair at the Royal Court Upstairs
, in a run that began on 14 October 2006 (because an...
Literary responses
Harold Pinter
Peter Hall
, its first director, likened the play to Mozart
's music for its precision, lyricism, and sudden descents into pain which are quickly over because of a healthy sense of the ridiculous.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Samuel Beckett
Literary responses
Sarah Kane
Meanwhile fellow-playwright Mark Ravenhill
, having initially concluded from the reviews that this was a bad play, was astonished at reading the first few lines and knowing that I was in the hands of a...
Literary responses
Anna Kavan
Jonathan Lethem revisited Ice in the New York Times fifty years after it appeared, in advance of its anniversary re-issue as a Penguin
classic. His notice opened arrestingly: Anna Kavan's Ice is book like the...
Literary responses
Christine Brooke-Rose
It bore an endorsement of CBR
's work by Marina Warner
, who considered that she brilliantly fuses political engagement, Beckett
ian rhythms and experimental language as well as form.
“Some Other Recommended Titles”. London Review of Books, p. 17.
Reviewing the novel for the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Iris Murdoch
Her omnivorous reading during the last year of her degree included the major modern novelists, notably including Proust
and Woolf
(the darling dangerous woman who made her feel quite incapable of writing anything straight...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Carson
AC
's contributions include rendering Fragment 286 by the Greek poet Ibykos
in the manner successively of various more modern voices: John Donne
, Samuel Beckett
, Franz Kafka
, an FBI
report on Bertolt Brecht
Intertextuality and Influence
Edna O'Brien
EOB
uses books as presiding spirits of her own writing. James Joyce
's image is at one end of the mantelpiece and Samuel Beckett
's at the other. . . . I write by hand...
Intertextuality and Influence
Shelagh Delaney
SD
wrote her first and most successful play, A Taste of Honey, at the age of nineteen. Published interviews give conflicting reports of her motivation for writing it. One interview quotes her as saying...
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Devlin
After writing for television, AD
was drawn to live theatre because of the medium's relative freedom from censorship and its enduring qualities: It is Literature. When you create a character in the theatre you are...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margaret Drabble
The protagonist of this book, ageing Francesca Stubbs, is employed as an inspector of retirement homes. She and the other characters here, witnessing the ends' of friends' lives and approaching their own, make sense of...