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This is the first book to focus on masculinity in Samuel Beckett´s work as a way to understand his historical and national context, the difficulty of reading and interpreting his texts, and his ruthless disintegration of sexual and gendered norms throughout his oeuvre.

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Introduction Traumatized Masculinity and Beckett´s Return The Masculine Protest: Murphy and Watt Return in the Postwar Fiction Embodying Lost Masculinity in Waiting for Godot and Endgame Rewinding Krapp´s Last Tape: The Return of Anglo-Irish Masculinity The Not I of Gender Identity in the Women-Centered Plays ´The churn of stale words in the heart again´: Beckett´s Final Return Conclusion: Masculine Dead Masculine

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"Jeffers´ Beckett´s Masculinity makes a significant and original contribution to criticism on Beckett in advancing the argument that his subversion of traditional gender roles reflects Beckett´s own sexual and cultural trauma." - Tony Bradley, co-editor of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland.

"Jeffers makes a major contribution to this progressive re-evaluation of Beckett and his work by illustrating how he struggled to represent the collapsing identity of a specific kind of man in the wake of what Beckett experienced as a catastrophic shift in power after the Irish War of Independence. By re-reading his work in terms of his struggle to negotiate the irreversible loss of patriarchal privilege he had been raised to assume as a given, Jeffers connects Beckett´s work with the exciting field of Masculinity Studies; perhaps more importantly, however, she re-positions his texts as valuable artifacts in the analysis of twentieth century Irish history, politics, and culture." - Stephen John Dilks, Associate Professor of English and Irish Literature, University of Missouri-Kansas City

"Among the high points of this volume is its consideration of the importance of Beckett´s brother Frank´s illness in understanding works like Endgame, in which Hamm often obsesses about the timing and taking of his painkillers and other aspects of being cared for." -History and Psyche

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JENNIFER JEFFERS is Professor of English at Cleveland State University, USA.

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