Beckett's Masculinity: New Interpretations of Beckett in 21st C

From Murphy to Rockaby to Worstward Ho , Beckett’s Masculinity illustrates how Samuel Beckett’s work functions as a testament to the site of memory for the historically erased twentieth-century Protestant, Anglo-Irish community. Jennifer Jeffers ably shows how Beckett converted his own personal traumatic loss of a masculine, patriarchal national identity into a sustained group of obsessive images in his texts. As Beckett’s work matured, he utilized the strategies of emasculation and gender distortion to dismantle Western masculinity. Beckett’s Masculinity shows that Western hegemonic masculinity was a source of private trauma and anxiety for Beckett; yet, he eventually transformed the twentieth-century literary landscape by harnessing the power of parodied masculinity and perverted gender in his work.