James Joyce in the context of "Absinthe"

Samuel Barclay Beckett (/ˈbɛkɪt/ ; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish playwright, poet, novelist, and literary critic. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical works feature bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic episodes of life, coupled with black comedy and literary nonsense. Beckett is widely regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century, credited with transforming modern theatre. As a major figure of Irish literature, he is best known for his tragicomedy play Waiting for Godot (1953). For his foundational contribution to both literature and theatre, Beckett received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation."

During his early career, Beckett worked as a literary critic and commentator, and in 1930 he took up a role as a lecturer in Dublin. He wrote his first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women in 1932, which influenced many of his later works, but it was not published until after his death. Around this time, Beckett also began studying artistic expressions and art history, particularly of paintings displayed at the National Gallery of Ireland. He maintained a close friendship with Irish writer James Joyce throughout his life, and cited him as a major inspiration for his works. As a resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English, sometimes under the pseudonym Andrew Belis. His later literary works, especially his plays, became increasingly austere and minimalistic as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness repetition and self-reference. During the Second World War, Beckett became a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria) and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1949.

Jane Eyre (/ɛər/ AIR; originally published as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography) is a novel by the English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published under her pen name "Currer Bell" on 19 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London. The first American edition was published in January 1848 by Harper & Brothers of New York. Jane Eyre is a bildungsroman that follows the experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr Rochester, the brooding master of Thornfield Hall.

The novel revolutionised prose fiction, being the first to focus on the moral and spiritual development of its protagonist through an intimate first-person narrative, where actions and events are coloured by a psychological intensity. Charlotte Brontë has been called the "first historian of the private consciousness" and the literary ancestor of writers such as Marcel Proust and James Joyce.

Irish literature is literature written in the Irish, Latin, English and Scots (Ulster Scots) languages on the island of Ireland. The earliest recorded Irish writing dates from back in the 7th century and was produced by monks writing in both Latin and Early Irish, including religious texts, poetry and mythological tales. There is a large surviving body of Irish mythological writing, including tales such as Táin Bó Cúailnge and Buile Shuibhne.

The English language was introduced to Ireland in the 13th century, following the Norman invasion of Ireland. The 16th and 17th centuries saw a major expansion of English power across Ireland, further expanding the presence of early Modern English speakers. One theory is that in the latter part of the nineteenth century saw a rapid replacement of Irish by English in the greater part of the country, largely due to the Great Famine and the subsequent decimation of the Irish population by starvation and emigration. Another theory among modern scholars is that far from being a sudden cataclysmic event the language shift was well underway much earlier. At the end of the century, however, cultural nationalism displayed a new energy, marked by the Gaelic Revival (which encouraged a modern literature in Irish) and more generally by the Irish Literary Revival.

In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator. It is usually in the form of an interior monologue which is disjointed or has irregular punctuation. While critics have pointed to various literary precursors, it was not until the 20th century that this technique was fully developed by modernist writers such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf.

Stream of consciousness narratives continue to be used in modern prose and the term has been adopted to describe similar techniques in other art forms such as poetry, songwriting and film.

Hypertext fiction is a genre of electronic literature characterized by the use of hypertext links that provide a new context for non-linearity in literature and reader interaction. The reader typically chooses links to move from one node of text to the next, and in this fashion arranges a story from a deeper pool of potential stories. Its spirit can also be seen in interactive fiction.

The term can also be used to describe traditionally published books in which a nonlinear narrative and interactive narrative is achieved through internal references. James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Enrique Jardiel Poncela's La Tournée de Dios (1932), Jorge Luis Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), Julio Cortázar's Rayuela (1963; translated as Hopscotch), and Italo Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) are early examples predating the word "hypertext", while a common pop-culture example is the Choose Your Own Adventure series in young adult fiction and other similar gamebooks, or Jason Shiga's Meanwhile, a graphic novel that allows readers to choose from a total of 3,856 possible linear narratives.

The encyclopedic novel is a genre of complex literary fiction which incorporates elements across a wide range of scientific, academic, and literary subjects. The concept was coined by Edward Mendelson in criticism of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, defined as an encyclopedia-like attempt to "render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge". In more general terms, the encyclopedic novel is a long, complex work of fiction that incorporates extensive information (which is sometimes fictional itself), often from specialized disciplines of science and the humanities. Mendelson's essays examine the encyclopedic tendency in the history of literature, considering the Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Faust, and Moby-Dick, with an emphasis on the modern Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow. Commonly cited examples of encyclopedic novels in the postmodern period include, in addition to Pynchon, Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations (1991), David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), and Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997). Other literary critics have explored the concept since, attempting to understand the function and effect of "encyclopedic" narratives, and coining the related terms systems novel and maximalist novel.

In philosophy and theology, metempsychosis (Ancient Greek: μετεμψύχωσις) is the transmigration of the soul, especially its reincarnation after death. The term is derived from ancient Greek philosophy, and has been recontextualized by modern philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer, Kurt Gödel, Mircea Eliade, and Magdalena Villaba; otherwise, the word "transmigration" is more appropriate. The word plays a prominent role in James Joyce's Ulysses and is also associated with Nietzsche. Another term sometimes used synonymously is palingenesis.

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a collaborator in Fascist Italy and the Salò Republic during World War II. His works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and The Cantos (c. 1915–1962).

Pound's contribution to poetry began in the early 20th century with his role in developing Imagism, a movement stressing precision and economy of language. Working in London as foreign editor of several American literary magazines, he helped to discover and shape the work of contemporaries such as H.D., Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. He was responsible for the 1914 serialization of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the 1915 publication of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce's Ulysses. Hemingway wrote in 1932 that, for poets born in the late 19th or early 20th century, not to be influenced by Pound would be "like passing through a great blizzard and not feeling its cold".

James Clarence Mangan, born James Mangan (Irish: Séamus Ó Mangáin; 1 May 1803 – 20 June 1849), was an Irish poet. He freely translated works from German, Turkish, Persian, Arabic, and Irish, with his translations of Goethe gaining special interest. Starting around 1840, and with increasing frequency after the Great Famine began, he wrote patriotic poems, such as A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century. Mangan was troubled, eccentric, and an alcoholic. He died early from cholera, amid the continuing dire conditions of the Famine. After his death, Mangan was hailed as Ireland's first national poet and admired by writers such as James Joyce and William Butler Yeats.