Beckett's Masculinity (New Interpertations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)

From Murphy to Rockaby to Worstward Ho , Beckett’s Masculinity illustrates how Samuel Beckett’s work functions as a testament to the site of memory for the historically erased twentieth-century Protestant, Anglo-Irish community. Jennifer Jeffers ably shows how Beckett converted his own personal traumatic loss of a masculine, patriarchal national identity into a sustained group of obsessive images in his texts. As Beckett’s work matured, he utilized the strategies of emasculation and gender distortion to dismantle Western masculinity. Beckett’s Masculinity shows that Western hegemonic masculinity was a source of private trauma and anxiety for Beckett; yet, he eventually transformed the twentieth-century literary landscape by harnessing the power of parodied masculinity and perverted gender in his work. This is the first book to focus on masculinity in Samuel Beckett's work as a way to understand his historical and national context, the difficulty of reading and interpreting his texts, and his ruthless disintegration of sexual and gendered norms throughout his oeuvre. This is the first book to focus on masculinity in Samuel Beckett's work as a way to understand his historical and national context, the difficulty of reading and interpreting his texts, and his ruthless disintegration of sexual and gendered norms throughout his oeuvre Traumatized masculinity and Beckett's return The masculine protest : Murphy and Watt Return in the postwar fiction Embodying lost masculinity in Waiting for Godot and Endgame Rewinding Krapp's last tape : the return of Anglo-Irish masculinity The not I of gender identity in the women-centered plays "The churn of stale words in the heart again" : Beckett's final return.