We are delighted to announce that Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process will be published by ibidem-Verlag in November 2021. In this monograph, Lucy Jeffery, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Samuel Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading, analyses Beckett’s use of the visual arts, music, and broadcasting media through a transdisciplinary approach. This book will be the eighth monograph of the ‘Samuel Beckett in Company’ series edited by Paul Stewart. 
In this crucial and timely publication, Jeffery makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the relation between Beckett, music, and the visual arts. To do so, Jeffery analyses specific instances where Beckett’s writing adopts musical and/or visual structures. The book is divided into four chapters: ‘Watt’s “wild and unintelligible” painting’, ‘Radio waves of “encircling gloo-oom”’, ‘Watching Beethoven and Schubert’ and ‘Paint it blue: “The vision at last”’. In each chapter, Jeffery draws on musicology and art history, on philosophy and literary theory in order to unpick the significance of Beckett’s own recourse to the arts. In this in-depth study, Jeffery evaluates Beckett’s stylistic shifts in relation to the cultural context, particularly the technological advancements and artistic movements, during Beckett wrote his texts. Jeffery positions Beckett as a key figure in the fields of visual arts, music, and broadcasting media. She foregrounds his transdisciplinary approach to writing by referring to new examples of work in progress from the Beckett Collection at the University of Reading.
In addition to this forthcoming monograph, Jeffery has also published extensively on Beckett in the Journal of Beckett Studies, Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Her forthcoming publications on Beckett can be found here. Jeffery’s interdisciplinary research has seen her publish on a range of other authors, including Harold Pinter, Ezra Pound, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Magda Szabó.
Transdisciplinary Beckett: Visual Arts, Music, and the Creative Process can be pre-ordered in the US and Canada here or worldwide here.