Search results for ""author chris ackerley""

Demented Particulars offers a detailed annotation of Samuel Beckett's first published novel, Murphy. The book includes an extensive Introduction, which outlines the compositional and publishing history of the novel, the critical debate, an account of Beckett's reading that went into the book, and a sophisticated discussion of the 'Cartesian catastrophe' at the heart of this comic cosmos. There is also an extensive bibliography of works pertinent to Murphy, and a thematic Index. The main thrust of the book concerns the page by page annotations of the novel itself, with close reference to the range of Beckett's reading (literary, philosophical, theological, biographical and other) that went into the making of this encyclopedic work. The importance of the study lies not simply in the discovery of many new facts, but equally in the assessment of how these laid the foundations for so much of Beckett's later work. The book pays tribute to the astounding range of Beckett's reading in the 1930s, and in so doing documents with precision the extent to which Beckett's later writings, and his dramatic pieces in particular, arise out of the matrix of the earlier works.

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Obscure Locks, Simple Keys is a comprehensive study of this most enigmatic of all of SmauelBeckett's texts. Chris Ackerley's approach, which has some similarities to genetic editing, is based on an extensive study of the manuscripts and different editions (including the French translation, overseen by Beckett himself) of the novel, and the long introduction covers the complex history of the book's composition and publication. The book includes a thematic Index and extensive Bibliography, as well as two appendices: one deals with 'Textual changes and errata in the major editions of Watt'; the other with the tangled question of 'The evolution of Watt'. Most of the work, however, concerns the detailed annotation of the text, and examines the range of literary, religious and philosophical matters that have informed and shaped the text. The primary aim of the volume is to offer a complete exposition of the novel's disconcerting difficulties, but another major objective, given the parlous state of previous editions, was to identify and correct the long history of textual error, with a view to the future publication of a better text.

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