Introduction - 'an anthropology of ourselves' Vs 'the incomprehensibility of the real': making the case for British social realism

In 1930, at the age of the twenty-four and unsure where his literary prospects lay, Samuel Beckett, the future Nobel Prize winner and leading figure of the twentieth-century literary avant-garde, gave a term's worth of lectures on modern French literature at his old university, Trinity College Dublin. Notes to these lectures survive as fragmentary transcriptions taken by a small number of the students then present.