MACMILLAN Samuel Beckett and BBC Radio: A Reassessment (New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)

This book is the first sustained examination of Samuel Beckett’s pivotal engagements with post-war BBC radio. The BBC acted as a key interpreter and promoter of Beckett’s work during this crucial period of his "getting known" in the Anglophone world in the 1950s and 1960s, especially through the culturally ambitious Third Programme, but also by the intermediary of the house magazine, The Listener. The BBC ensured a sizeable but also informed reception for Beckett’s radio plays and various “adaptations” (including his stage plays, prose, and even poetry); the audience that Beckett's works reached by radio almost certainly exceeded in size his readership or theatre audiences at the time. In rethinking several key aspects of his relationship with the BBC, a mix of new and familiar Beckett critics take as their starting point the previously neglected BBC radio archives held at the Written Archive Centre in Caversham, Berkshire. The results of this extended reassessment are timely and, in many cases, quite surprising for readers of Beckett and for scholars of radio, “late modernism,” and post-war British culture more broadly. Review “This book explicitly sets out to reassess the complex and changing relationship between Beckett and BBC Radio – and it does that very well indeed. All in all, then, this volume does full justice to its intricate subject matter by dint of the vast array of different approaches and viewpoints it brings together.” (Pedro Querido, Journal of Beckett Studies, Vol. 27 (1), April, 2018) “The value of the book is largely attributable to the rigor and insight that the contributors have brought to that vast array of (non-digitized) material. … this is a book for specialists and, as such, is destined to become the go-to source for empirical information about the nature and extent of Beckett’s work with the BBC … . Overall, this is a fine book” (Seán Kennedy, James Joyce Literary Supplement, Vol. 32 (01), 2018) From the Back Cover This book is the first sustained examination of Samuel Beckett’s pivotal engagements with post-war BBC radio. The BBC acted as a key interpreter and promoter of Beckett’s work during this crucial period of his "getting known" in the Anglophone world in the 1950s and 1960s, especially through the culturally ambitious Third Programme, but also by the intermediary of the house magazine, The Listener. The BBC ensured a sizeable but also informed reception for Beckett’s radio plays and various “adaptations” (including his stage plays, prose, and even poetry); the audience that Beckett's works reached by radio almost certainly exceeded in size his readership or theatre audiences at the time. In rethinking several key aspects of his relationship with the BBC, a mix of new and familiar Beckett critics take as their starting point the previously neglected BBC radio archives held at the Written Archive Centre in Caversham, Berkshire. The results of this extended reassessment are timely and, in many cases, quite surprising for readers of Beckett and for scholars of radio, “late modernism,” and post-war British culture more broadly. About the Author David Addyman is Peder Sather Research Fellow at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has published a number of articles and chapters on Beckett. Matthew Feldman is Professor in the Modern History of Ideas at Teesside University, UK. He has published widely on Beckett, including Beckett’s Books and the collection of essays Falsifying Beckett. Erik Tonning is Professor of British Literature and Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway. His publications include Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama and Modernism and Christianity.