This collection of essays reveals the extent to which politics is fundamental to our understanding of Samuel Beckett's life and writing. Bringing together internationally established and emerging scholars,Beckett and Politics considers Beckett's work as it relates to three broad areas of political discourse: language politics, biopolitics and geopolitics. Through a range of critical approaches, including performance studies, political theory, gender theory, historicizing approaches and language theory, the book demonstrates how politics is more than just another thematic lens: it is fundamentally and structurally intrinsic to Beckett's life, his texts and subsequent interpretations of them. This important collection of essays demonstrates that Beckett's work is not only ripe for political engagement, but also contains significant opportunities for understanding and illuminating the broader relationships between literature, culture and politics.

William Davies is a research fellow at the University of Reading, UK. His work on Samuel Beckett includes various articles and book chapters, the volumeSamuel Beckett and Europe: History, Culture, Tradition (2017), co-edited with Michela Bariselli and Niamh M. Bowe, the monographSamuelBeck tt and the Second World War (2020) andThe Poetry of Samuel Beckett (2021), co-edited with James Brophy.

Helen Bailey is an independent scholar and works as an Access to HE tutor at Loughborough College of Further and Higher Education, UK. Her publications appear in various journals and books, includingThe Oxford Handbook of Contemporary English and Irish Poetry(2013),Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui(2019) andThe Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature (2021). She is currently preparing a book on Beckett, music and spirituality.