Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett's Work (New Interpertations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century)

Sex and Aesthetics in Samuel Beckett’s Works places sex and sexuality firmly at the heart of Beckett’s ouevre. From the earliest prose to the late plays, Paul Stewart uncovers a profound mistrust of procreation and a surprising variety of non-reproductive forms of sex— the solitary, the homoerotic, and the geriatric—which challenge established notions of propriety and identity politics. Sex informs Beckett’s search for a means of aesthetic creation not infected by aspects of natural procreation, and the suffering and death which it entails, in the hope that the tyranny of Schopenhauer’s will-to-live might be overcome. Paul Stewart ably and amply shows that sex, so long overlooked, is an integral, and troubling, facet of Beckett’s art.