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Chapter
Conclusion
In each chapter, I have emphasized Beckett’s continuous return in his work to the site of the place left vacant by the absent father. The father is rendered absent by the political and cultural shift in Ireland....
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Chapter
Introduction
Similar to Simone de Beauvoir’s perspective that the masculine is universal, Wittig attributes to masculinity a kind of transparency; we have always looked at the world as masculine; in fact, we have looked thro...
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Chapter
Traumatized Masculinity and Beckett’s Return
Samuel Beckett, as a member of the coming-of-age generation of displaced Irish Protestants after the formation of the Free State, continually revisits the theme of displacement and return through the problem of....
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Chapter
Return in the Postwar Fiction
After the Liberation of France, Beckett and Suzanne returned to Paris to find that their apartment had been occupied during their time in Roussillon, though it had not been ransacked or burglarized.1 Although the...
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Chapter
Rewinding Krapp’s Last Tape: The Return of Anglo-Irish Masculinity
Written with Irishman Pat Magee’s voice in his head, Beckett composes Krapp’s Last Tape in seven succinct stages in March 1958. In this chapter I will discuss the unfolding of Beckett’s drafts of Krapp’s Last Ta...
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Chapter
“The Churn of Stale Words in the Heart Again”: Beckett’s Final Return
Coming out of a period of writing that included A Piece of Monologue for actor David Warrilow in the late 1970s, Beckett turns to a series of prose pieces that become his late prose “Trilogy,” Nohow On: Company ...
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Chapter
The Masculine Protest: Murphy and Watt
After the death of Beckett’s father in the summer of 1933 and subsequent paralyzing psychosomatic symptoms, Beckett embarked on a course of psychoanalysis in London just before Christmas 1933.2 Fifty years later...
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Chapter
Embodying Lost Masculinity in Waiting for Godot and Endgame
In the midst of the writing of the Trilogy of novels, Beckett began to write a play that was “a relaxation from the awful prose I was writing at that time.”1 Waiting for Godot was written in French from October ...
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Chapter
The Not I of Gender Identity in the Women-Centered Plays
From the last chapter we know that Beckett had a special attachment to Krapp’s Last Tape, and those images in the play were an acknowledgment of his Anglo-Irish Protestant heritage. The fact that Happy Days is w...
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Chapter
Introduction Irish Culture in a State of Becoming
The 1990s was a boom period for the Irish novel as a group of young Irish novelists came to the fore to create an entirely new agenda for the genre of the novel. Young novelists, mostly in their thirties or you.....
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Chapter
Afterword
Positioned now in the twenty-first century, we may recall, perhaps in an ironic manner, the words of the early twentieth-century critic, Lionel Johnson: “After all, who is to decide what is, absolutely and defi.....
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Chapter
Irish Identity
With this chapter we concentrate on novels that depict gender, sexual, and cultural norms in contemporary Ireland. We want to see how the body is typically presented and functions, how gender is typically estab.....
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Chapter
Immeasurable Distance
“Immeasurable distance” refers to ones ability to “measure” the distance between, say, point A and point B. If however A and B cannot be clearly distinguished, demarcated, or identified, then there is no way to m...
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Chapter
The Politics of Gender, Bodies, and Power
In this chapter I wish to broach two issues that will enable us to better understand, theorize about, and critique Irish novels from the last decade (1989–1999) of the twentieth century—especially those written.....
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Chapter
Bodies over the Boundary
In this chapter we will interpret texts that present an unusual set of circumstances in the contemporary Irish novel. The novels in this chapter flagrantly disrupt the boundaries of gender and sexuality, which .....
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Chapter
Discourse and the Body
In this chapter the body becomes more difficult to chart because fictional bodies whirl out of control and confound customary narrative, and produce another kind of sense. The body blurs the power grid, challen.....