New analyses on the insightful ways in which Beckett's work actively engages with contested notions of Nature and the natural, developing a radical version of modernism's main questions and insights.

Beckett and Nature takes its cue from contemporary developments in Beckett scholarship focused on ecocriticism, posthumanism, and the Anthropocene, going beyond them into a questioning of the very concepts of “Nature” and “the natural.” It examines one of the most unthought ontological dimensions of literature and life: that symbolic space, deemed natural or part of Nature, appears necessary and undeniable and, therefore, impossible to be deconstructed. In doing so, the authors show that, in fact, this space takes on many shapes, recognizing three “natural” dimensions criticized by Beckett: bodies, worlds, and literatures.

Featuring a wide range of both Beckett's work and Beckett scholars – including Jean-Michel Rabaté and Stanley E. Gontarski – Beckett and Nature offers contextualized readings of the understandings of nature and the natural throughout his decade-spanning œuvre. The volume shows that part of the radicality of Beckett's writing is that – through a variety of evolving techniques and strategies – it questions what appears in our cultures as the most unquestionable and opens up possibilities for thinking not only what is human, literature, and philosophy, but also gender, identity, and any attempt at definitions of ourselves or the world at large.

Charles Clements holds a PhD in English Literature from Tufts University, USA. His research focuses on the metaphysical assumptions of 20th-century Irish and British fiction with a particular emphasis on issues of radical politics, representation, and non-knowledge.

Eleanor Green works at the University of Manchester, UK. Their book, Sex and Whiteness in Samuel Beckett's 1960s Prose, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.

James Martell, a former visiting fellow at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Thinking Surfaces in French Contemporary Thought (forthcoming with SUNY Press), Beckett and Derrida (Cambridge, 2024), and Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal (Routledge, 2019) and the editor of Understanding Sade, Understanding Modernism (2025). Two other upcoming books are Beyond Matter & Form: Surfaces & Neo-Hylomorphism and Foiled Reflections: Mirror Stages for Stupid Times in Literature, Art, Film, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy.