Beckett's Eighteenth Century

Download or read book Beckett's Eighteenth Century written by F. Smith and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-12-17 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beckett's Eighteenth Century is the first book-length study of Samuel Beckett's affinity with the British eighteenth century and of the influence of its writers on his work. Reading Swift, Pope, Defoe, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, Gray, and other writers of this period, this study demonstrates how he was not only influenced by them but interprets them for us in a quite modern way. Beckett's uniqueness is not questioned here, but this uniqueness is shown, paradoxically, to have its roots at least in part in his native literature of two centuries ago.