Pim Verhulst

• University of Antwerp

Providing a broad, definitive account of how the ‘archival turn’ in humanities scholarship has shaped modernist studies, this book also functions as an ongoing ‘practitioner's toolkit’ (including useful bibliographical resources) and a guide to avenues for future work. Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past...

This article discusses a recently discovered copy of William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth that once belonged to Samuel Beckett when he was a student at Portora Royal in 1922. Although the volume is in private hands, scans of the annotated pages are freely available in the Beckett Digital Library of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. Compared to...

This article analyzes Beckett’s radio plays Embers and Words and Music in the context of the BBC Third Programme and its cultural politics, to argue that they engage with the censorship of his work, especially when it comes to sexual matters, in hitherto unexplored ways. While Embers both challenges and eludes censorship by means of ambiguous or ab...

Samuel Beckett and Translation explores the idea that at the core of Beckett’s work there is no fixed centre but a constant movement between variants of French and English. This collection of newly commissioned edited essays opens up original lines of enquiry into this restless impulse and how it finds a resonance in Beckett’s writing. The book, in...

This collection of essays is the first comprehensive discussion of the role technology plays in shaping Beckett’s trademark aesthetics. Samuel Beckett and Technology assembles an innovative and diverse range of scholarly approaches to the topic, which collectively renegotiate our understanding of his work in prose, theatre, film, radio and televisi...

When literary authors translate their own work, they sometimes collaborate with other writer-translators. While such “collaboration” is often acknowledged on the title pages of the resulting publications, the nature of each joint venture is typically very different in practice. Surviving archival traces often allow for a more detailed reconstructio...

A stark departure from traditional philology, What is Authorial Philology? is the first comprehensive treatment of authorial philology as a discipline in its own right. It provides readers with an excellent introduction to the theory and practice of editing ‘authorial texts’ alongside an exploration of authorial philology in its cultural and concep...

Despite Beckett’s claim of having a “bee in [his] bonnet” about “mixing media,” intermediality and transmedial adaptation were important sources of innovation for his writing, especially from the 1950s onwards. The present article analyses Play (1964) as a good example of this dynamic by demonstrating (1) how its genesis was influenced by Beckett’s...

Play is usually regarded as the starting point of Beckett's late theatre, introducing a radically new approach to the body and language that set a benchmark for subsequent plays such as Not I, That Time and Footfalls. Building on Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days, Play dehumanizes its characters by means of the audiovisual technologies that Beckett...

This chapter argues that the radio medium had an important influence on the development of Beckett’s ‘postcognitivist modernism’. While his first radio play, All That Fall, was still quite conventional in the way it resorts to dramatic techniques and depicts fictional minds as an interaction between inside and outside, Embers set off on a radical c...

In the 1950s, Samuel Beckett worked together with a number of writer-translators on English, French and German versions of his novels and plays. This article studies the material traces of these collaborations to analyse the collaborations as a crucial phase in a 4-step process toward a poetics of bilingualism, consisting of (1) writing in another...

This book of collected essays approaches Beckett’s work through the context of modernism, while situating it in the literary tradition at large. It builds on current debates aiming to redefine ‘modernism’ in connection to concepts such as ‘late modernism’ or ‘postmodernism’. Instead of definitively re-categorizing Beckett under any of these labels,...

During our work on the transcription of the manuscript notebooks of Malone meurt for the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, we recently discovered a draft of the poem ‘Le Petit Sot’ which, to the best of our knowledge, was so far unknown to Beckett scholars. In this article, we situate the draft in its material and chronological context, and relat...

This chapter nuances Martin Esslin’s claim that Beckett was never commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Not only did he allow himself to be engaged in an official sense at one point in his career, his own use of the term reflects a changing relationship with the BBC throughout the late 1950s, the early 1960s and the mid-1970s....

As opposed to Beckett's drama and, to a lesser degree, his television plays, the six scripts he wrote for radio are generally considered to be a textually stable category in his body of work. The only well-known exception is Cascando, whose American and British first editions were distinguished by more than fifty variants. When Everett Frost confro...

Of Beckett's six radio plays, only the date of Pochade radiophonique (Rough for Radio II) is uncertain. All critics, following Beckett, have suggested an early 1960s origin, but this paper proposes a late 1958 dating, which situates the radio play just before Comment c 'est. On the basis of related archival material, such as the Barbara Bray letter...

When the English Molloy was published in 1955, jointly by Olympia (Paris) and Grove (New York), a long and difficult translation process had ended, on which Beckett worked both alone and together with Merlin and Patrick Bowles. This article is the first attempt to approach this somewhat neglected topic by way of manuscripts, notebooks, letters and...

Samuel Beckett's drafts often depart from a concrete depiction, which is then gradually compacted. A peculiar example is the textual development of Beckett's play Not I/Pas moi. The recognisable Irish setting of the early 'Kilcool' manuscripts is cut back as the writing process evolves. The French translation removes all Irish references, yielding...