Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts is the first book to comprehensively assess Beckett's knowledge of art, art history and art criticism. In his lifetime Beckett thought deeply about visual culture from ancient Egyptian statuary to Dutch realism, from Quattrocento painting to the modernists and after. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished sources, this book traces in forensic detail the development of Beckett's understanding of painting in particular, as that understanding developed from the late 1920s to the 1970s. In doing so it demonstrates that Beckett's thinking about art and aesthetics radically changes in the course of his life, often directly responding to the intellectual and historical contexts in which he found himself. Moving fluently between art history, philosophy, literary analysis and historical context, Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts rethinks the trajectory of Beckett's career, and reorients his relationship to modernism, late modernism and the avant-gardes.

'The Ends of Ireland' considers the work of a key group of critics emerging from Ireland through the 1980s and 1990s: Seamus Deane, Luke Gibbons, David Lloyd, W. J. McCormack, Gerardine Meaney and Emer Nolan. As the main representatives of the turn to theory in Irish Studies these critics have examined Irish culture in the light of ideas taken from psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism and postcolonialism. In a series of incisive yet accessible chapters Carville analyses the way in which these often provocative ideas have been put to work in the Irish context, transforming our understanding of writers like Joyce and Beckett, as well as informing broader debates around nationalism, modernization, memory and historical revisionism. Essential reading for anyone concerned with Irish Studies and its relationship with theory, the issues raised by 'The Ends of Ireland' set a new agenda for Irish Studies in the coming times. -- .

Samuel Beckett's 1976 Television play Ghost Trio is one of his most beautiful and mysterious works. It is also the play that most clearly demonstrates Beckett's imaginative and aesthetic engagement with the visual arts and the history of painting in particular. Drawing on the work of Stanley Cavell and Michael Fried, On Ghost Trio demonstrates Beckett's exploration of the relationship between theatricality, absorption and objecthood, and shows how his work anticipates the development of video and installation art. In doing so Conor Carville develops a new and highly original reading of Beckett's art, rooted in both archival sources and philosophical aesthetics.

Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts is the first book to comprehensively assess Beckett's knowledge of art, art history and art criticism. In his lifetime Beckett thought deeply about visual culture from ancient Egyptian statuary to Dutch realism, from Quattrocento painting to the modernists and after. Drawing on a wide range of published and unpublished sources, this book traces in forensic detail the development of Beckett's understanding of painting in particular, as that understanding developed from the late 1920s to the 1970s. In doing so it demonstrates that Beckett's thinking about art and aesthetics radically changes in the course of his life, often directly responding to the intellectual and historical contexts in which he found himself. Moving fluently between art history, philosophy, literary analysis and historical context, Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts rethinks the trajectory of Beckett's career, and reorients his relationship to modernism, late modernism and the avant-gardes.

Armagh born poet Conor Carville's debut collection of poems is an astonishingly confident and accomplished one, formally assured and always surprising and inventive. The poems move back and forth in time and across the world to listen to accounts of harm and the means through which it has been resisted or overcome. The voices of St. Patrick's sister, of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Kandinsky, Walter Benjamin, an 18th century mariner and a wheelie-bin are just some of those that appear in poems that probe the limits of historical memory and measure the reverberations of violence both psychic and political. Memories of childhood and youth in Northern Ireland merge with reflections on the globalized present in a book that is as varied in its music and form as it is moving and incisive in its content.

The title poem of Conor Carville's second collection takes off from a London church and its congregation, but pushes on out into planetary, even cosmic dimensions. In another poem, the head of the Blessed Oliver Plunkett appears in the TV room of a London mental hospital, to tell the strange story of a mass on Clapham Common in 1984, when the London-Irish assembled to celebrate his beatification. These poems, and many others here, reassert the capacity of song to grasp the shape of a life, a community, or a world, in the shadow of its vast disorder. Sometimes lyric, sometimes violent, this is a book that teems with the martyrdoms, both everyday and epic, that punctuate our lives.