Samuel Beckett and The Bible

From Waiting for Godot to such later novels as Ill Seen, Ill Said, the work of Samuel Beckett is filled with Biblical references. Samuel Beckett and the Bible re-appraises the relationships between Beckett's work and the Bible, exploring both as objects of history, matter and memory. Iain Bailey ranges across the Beckett oeuvre to examine how the Bible has come to be regarded as a book of unique significance in his work, offering innovative readings of intertextuality and influence in both published and archival writings. Beckett's Bibles, the book demonstrates, are thoroughly material, as significant for their involvement in histories of education, the family, common knowledge and canon-formation as for what they have to say about God, hope and salvation. The book explores Beckett's uneasy forms of memory, materiality, language and history to assess how far and in what ways the Bible matters in his work, and why Beckett's voice 'harps, but no worse than Holy Writ.'

Iain Bailey is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK.

Introduction: Moaning that the Sparks Fly Upwards
1. Recognising the Bible in Beckett
2. Read to Me as a Child: Memory, Voice and Religious Feeling
3. What Matter: Archive, Chronicle and Signature
4. Bawd and Blasphemer from Paris: Nation and Irritation
5. The Bible in a Bilingual Oeuvre
6. Sum Assess: the Biblical and the Generic
7. Terrible Materiality: Script and Holy Writ
Conclusion: Scattered Abroad
Bibliography
Index