Samuel Beckett and Cultural Nationalism

Drawing on evidence from his published works manuscripts and correspondence Samuel Beckett and Cultural Nationalism explores Beckett''s engagement with the theme of cultural nationalism throughout his writing life revealing the various ways in which he sought to challenge culturally nationalist conceptions of art and literature while never embracing a cosmopolitan approach. The Element shows how in his pre-Second World War writings Beckett sought openly to mock Irish nationalist ideas of culture and language but that in so doing he failed to avoid what he himself described as a ''clot of prejudices''. In his post-war works in French and English however following time spent in Nazi Germany in 1936-7 as well as in the French Resistance during the Second World War Beckett began to take a new approach to ideas of national-cultural affiliation at the heart of which was a conception of the human as a citizen of nowhere.