Samuel Beckett

AUTHOR APPROVED Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing 'This beautifully written study takes the reader on an exhilarating journey through a wealth of comic manifestations in Beckett's work. It's nuanced and insightful analysis draws on a range of thinkers, to produce fresh and original readings of Beckett's carefully calibrated laughter-craft.' Mary Bryden, University of Reading 'Always itself witty and entertaining, this is the first comprehensive picture of the way that Beckett's comedy is woven into the temporal, ethical and political fabric of his writing. In this book, Laura Salisbury shows us that comedy is not a by-product of Beckett's work - not a consolation for the bleakness of his vision, or a side effect of it - but the motor that drives his literary thinking.' Peter Boxall, Sussex University It is a mark of the real brilliance of Samuel Beckett: Laughing Matters, Comic Timing that it should open these kinds of new interpretive possibilities, not only for an understanding of Beckett (crucial as this book will be for Beckett studies) but also for an understanding of the humour and culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Journal of Beckett Studies Reads Beckett's comic timing as part of a post-war ethics of representation Samuel Beckett is a funny writer. He is also an author whose work is taken to respond ethically to the unspeakable seriousness of the post-Holocaust situation. How can these two statements sit together? Ranging widely over Beckett's fiction, drama and critical writings, and including readings of Murphy, the Trilogy, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the late prose and the late plays, this book demonstrates that it is through Beckett's comic timing that we can understand the double gesture of his art: the ethical obligation to represent the world how it is while, at the same time, opening up a space for how it ought to be. Laura Salisbury is a Senior Lecturer in Medicine and English Literature at the University of Exeter. She is co-editor of Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950 (2010). Her current research project is a study of the relationship between neurological conceptions of language, modernism and modernity. Jacket image: Samuel Beckett, 1960 (c) Lutfi Ozkok/Sipa/Rex Features Jacket design: [insert logo file] www.euppublishing.com ISBN 978-0-7486-4748-4 [please add in the white area above the barcode] Barcode

Dr Laura Salisbury is RCUK Research Fellow in Science, Technology, and Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. She works on modernist and contemporary literature and on the relationship between science, philosophy and culture. Her major new research project is a study of the relationship between neurological conceptions of language, modernism, and modernity.