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In the wake of both Joycean and Dantean celebrations, this volume aims to investigate the fecund influence of Italian culture on Samuel Beckett’s work, with a specific focus on the twentieth century.

Located at the intersection of historical avant-garde movements and a renewed interest in tradition, Italian modernism reimagined Italy and its culture, projecting it beyond the shadow of fascism. Following in Joyce’s footsteps, Samuel Beckett soon became an attentive reader of Italian modernist authors. These had a profound effect on his early work, shaping his artistic identity. The influence of his early readings found its way also into Beckett’s postwar writing and, most poignantly, in his theatre. The contributions in this collection rekindle the debate around Beckett as modernist author through the lenses of Italian culture.

This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies, Italian studies, English studies, and comparative literature.

In the wake of both Joycean and Dantean celebrations, this volume aims to investigate the fecund influence of Italian culture on Samuel Beckett’s work, with a specific focus on the twentieth century.

Located at the intersection of historical avant-garde movements and a renewed interest in tradition, Italian modernism reimagined Italy and its culture, projecting it beyond the shadow of fascism. Following in Joyce’s footsteps, Samuel Beckett soon became an attentive reader of Italian modernist authors. These had a profound effect on his early work, shaping his artistic identity. The influence of his early readings found its way also into Beckett’s postwar writing and, most poignantly, in his theatre. The contributions in this collection rekindle the debate around Beckett as modernist author through the lenses of Italian culture.

This study will be of particular interest to students and scholars in theatre and performance studies, Italian studies, English studies, and comparative literature.

Beckett’s dialogue with the arts (music, painting, digital media) has found a growing critical attention, from seminal comprehensive studies (Oppenheim 2000; Harvey, 1967, to name just two) to more recent contributions (Gontarski, ed., 2014; Lloyd, 2018). Research has progressively moved from a general inquiry on Beckett beyond the strictly literary to issues related to intermediality and embodiment (Maude, 2009; Tajiri, 2007), post humanism and technology (Boulter, 2019; Kirushina, Adar, Nixon eds, 2021), intersections with popular culture (Pattie and Stewart, eds., 2019). However, a specific analysis on Beckett’s relationship with Italian arts and poetry on one side–and on Italian artists’ response to Beckett’s oeuvre on the other–is still missing. The volume offers an original examination of Beckett’s presence on the contemporary Italian cultural scene, a stage where he became (andstill is) the fulcrum of some of the most significant experimentations across different genres and media. The reader will look at him as an “Italian” artist, in constant dialogue with the most significant modern European cultural turns.