Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath by James McNaughton, Beckett’s Political Imagination by Emilie Morin

The publication of James McNaughton’s superb Samuel Beckett and the Politics of Aftermath hard on the heels of Emile Morin’s equally impressive Beckett’s Political Imagination suggests the delayed confirmation of a political turn (to join so many other “turns”—from the linguistic to the historical and ethical) in Beckett studies. On the one hand, the books could be said to represent an outcome that the field has been waiting for since the mid-1990s and the publication of James Knowlson’s and Anthony Cronin’s major biographies, which helped to better position the life and career of one of the twentieth century’s most important and enigmatic authors in relation to the many upheavals that characterized his times. McNaughton’s and Morin’s recent investigations have also been spurred along by the publication of Beckett’s letters in four volumes beginning a decade ago, as well as Mark Nixon’s work on Beckett’s German diaries, which chronicle the writer’s...