Introduction

This introductory chapter responds to the proliferation and diversification of adaptations of Beckett’s work across different genres and media since the author’s death in 1989. It summarises recent debates in the field of adaptation studies which has likewise expanded, reflecting critically on earlier debates and taking account of new media, while clarifying terminology that will return in the chapters that follow. These approaches resist the traditional value-laden hierarchy between ‘original’ and ‘adaptation’, offering instead different frameworks for analysing the cultural, aesthetic, political and media-specific, intermedial or transmedial contexts of each new version and its relationship to its source text/s or inspiration. Issues relating specifically to the status of Beckett as a canonical author in relation to cultural authority and ‘authorisation’ are included. These theoretical discussions lay the foundation for an introduction to this collection of essays on Beckett’s ‘afterlives’, which is the first book-length study to be devoted to Beckett and adaptation, although existing scholarly work in this area is noted as well. The rest of the Introduction summarises each chapter and the rationale for how they have been grouped in order to encourage resonances and dialogues between them.