The dozen essays brought together here, alongside a newly-written introduction, contextualize and exemplify the recent "empirical turn" in Beckett studies. Characterized, above all, by recourse to manuscript materials in constructing revisionist interpretations, this approach has helped to transform the study of Samuel Beckett over the past generation. In addition to focusing upon Beckett's early immersion in philosophy and psychology, other chapters similarly analyze his later collaboration with the BBC through the lens of literary history. Falsifying Beckett thus offers new readings of Beckett by returning to his archive of notebooks, letters, and drafts. In reassessing key aspects of his development as one of the 20th century's leading artists, this collection is of interest to all students of Beckett's writing as well as "historicist" scholars and critics of modernism more generally.
Dr Matthew Feldman is a Reader in Contemporary History at Teesside University, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway, and a Senior Researcher with the Cantemir Institute, University of Oxford. Dr Paul Jackson is co-editor of Wiley-Blackwell's online journal Compass: Political Religions, an editor of the Mapping the Far Right book series, and an Associate Editor of the Historicising Modernism book series.