Former Chester English Student Publishes Book

Tim Lawrence, who studied English Literature at Chester from 2005 To 2008, has written a critical study of modernist author Samuel Beckett. Tim’s book, entitled Samuel Beckett's Critical Aesthetics, has just been published by Palgrave. Tim is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of York.

This book considers how Samuel Beckett’s critical essays, dialogues and reflections drew together longstanding philosophical discourses about the nature of representation, and fostered crucial, yet overlooked, connections between these discourses and his fiction and poetry. It also pays attention to Beckett’s writing for little-magazines in France from the 1930s to the 1950s, before going on to consider how the style of Beckett’s late prose recalls and develops figures and themes in his critical writing. By providing a long-overdue assessment of Beckett’s work as a critic, this study shows how Beckett developed a new aesthetic in knowing dialogue with ideas including phenomenology, Kandinsky’s theories of abstraction, and avant-garde movements such as Surrealism. This book will be illuminating for students and researchers interested not just in Beckett, but in literary modernism, the avant-garde, European visual culture and philosophy.

Reviews for Samuel Beckett's Critical Aesthetics
“With this book, Tim Lawrence delivers a long overdue examination of Beckett’s critical writings. Samuel Beckett’s Critical Aesthetics not only offers a sensitive, perceptive reading of these texts, but also reveals the way in which they establish an aesthetic and philosophical dialogue with Beckett’s creative enterprise. Drawing on a wide range of archival and critical sources, Lawrence’s study will surely establish itself as the indispensable guide to Beckett’s critical thought.” (Dr Mark Nixon, Co-Director, Beckett International Foundation)

“Tim Lawrence has written the first sustained analysis of Samuel Beckett’s critical writings, which are masterfully read within the context of their intellectual history. His readings are subtle, nuanced and illuminating. This book will offer an indispensable point of reference for future critical studies of Beckett’s work.” (Dr Ulrika Maude, Reader in Modernism and Twentieth-Century Literature, University of Bristol, UK)