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.

Post-war works and new approach

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.