Women and Ireland as Beckett's Lost Others: Beyond Mourning and Melancholia

Opening up contemporary debates about emotion in social and historical contexts, Women and Ireland as Beckett's Lost Others investigates the relationship between emotion, memory, exile and language. Using a psychoanalytic framework, this monograph traces discourses of mourning (Klein), melancholia (Freud) and abjection (Kristeva) in Beckett's prose and drama, and demonstrates how Ireland and women are often Beckett's objects of loss. This study primarily focuses on Beckett's exploitation of ambivalent yet conscious use of psychoanalytic concepts in his works on an aesthetic level. It also addresses the impact of one of the key events in Beckett's life, his self-imposed exile, on his poetics of grieving. By exploring Beckett's ambiguous representations of his homeland - Ireland - and women in general and the mother in particular throughout his oeuvre, this study unveils his uneasy relationship with them - an anxious part of his identity.