In the wake of both Joycean and Dantean celebrations, this volume aims to investigate the fecund influence of Italian culture on Samuel Beckett’s work, with a specific focus on the twentieth century.
Located at the intersection of historical avant-garde movements and a renewed interest in tradition, Italian modernism reimagined Italy and its culture, projecting it beyond the shadow of fascism. Following in Joyce’s footsteps, Samuel Beckett soon became an attentive reader of Italian modernist authors. These had a profound effect on his early work, shaping his artistic identity. The influence of his early readings found its way also into Beckett’s postwar writing and, most poignantly, in his theatre. The contributions in this collection rekindle the debate around Beckett as modernist author through the lenses of Italian culture.
This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies, Italian studies, English studies, and comparative literature.
In the wake of both Joycean and Dantean celebrations, this volume aims to investigate the fecund influence of Italian culture on Samuel Beckett’s work, with a specific focus on the Twentieth Century.
Part 1 Beckett and Italian Interwar Culture
1. Becketts Dystopian
Trilogy, Part I: Luckys Cerebral Physiology and the Irrelevance of Godot
2. Leopardi in Becketts Late Modernist Romanticism
3. Mirror Acts: Dramatic
Form in Pirandellos Six Characters in Search of an Author and Becketts
Waiting for Godot Part 2 Beckett, Modernism and Tradition: Absurdism and
Purgatorial Shadows
4. Analogymongering: Dante and Vico in Beckett
5. Denti
Alligator or Airtight Alligator: Reading Dante with Joyce and Beckett
6.
Beckett and Ariosto: Nominalist Irony, Perhaps
7. Becketts Kickoff:
Orlando Furioso as Theatre of the Absurd Part 3 Beckett, Italian Modernism
and Late Modernism: Theatre, Intermediality and Testimony
8. Samuel Beckett
and Italian Culture: From Dantesque Scenarios to the Theatre Scene of the
2000s
9. Samuel Becketts Not I Purgatorially Merciful?
10. A Theatre of
Concrete Visual Images [ ], a Theatre of Poetic Images: The Staging of
Neither by the Italian VideoArt Group Studio Azzurro
11. Company: Beckett,
Tabucchi, and Testimony
Michela Bariselli is a Lecturer in Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, University of Reading.
Davide Crosara is a Research Fellow in English Literature at the University of Rome, Sapienza.
Antonio Gambacorta is a translator and a literary scholar with a PhD from the University of Reading.
Mario Martino is Professor of English Literature at the University of Rome, Sapienza.
