The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP) brings together digital facsimiles of the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett’s works – documents currently held in over thirteen libraries and archives in Europe and North America – with the aim of furthering genetic criticism. Incorporating three of the eight modules available for researchers engaging with the BDMP website as of August 2020, together with one forthcoming monograph study whose corresponding digital module has yet to be made live on the site, this article will, in effect, make use of three novels and one novella, all in both their French and English iterations, in order to present concrete examples of the ways in which the exposition of idiosyncratic features of Beckett’s œuvre is being facilitated by this nascent digital archive.

This article argues for a reconsideration of Gertrude Stein's influence on the development of Samuel Beckett's aesthetics of language, together with the overall comparability of their work. The article will demonstrate that when read through the context of Beckett's observations on Stein in the 1937 German letter, their respective approaches towards the same operation, namely the logographic representation of a word in other words, is highly comparable. The article forwards Stein's Tender Buttons as a text that can be considered highly compatible with Beckett's observations on Stein in the German letter and argues for a reconsideration of the avenues through which Beckett may have encountered Stein's work, specifically in relation to the magazine transition. The article subsequently compares Stein's representation of objects in Tender Buttons (published in transition 14), with excerpts from Beckett's Murphy and Watt, followed by an extended analysis of Ill Seen Ill Said.

This essay analyses the imbalance identifiable in critical approaches to the gendering of Beckett’s influences with respect to his autographic writing. Contrasting Beckett’s Company with Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, I unravel the particulars that have led to Stein’s marginalisation as a figure against which we can situate Beckett’s autographic writings, with a view to further understanding why the remarkable correspondence between Beckett and Stein’s autographic praxes has continually evaded critical attention. Building on Porter Abbott’s description of autography as self-writing, I propose that Stein’s autography be considered an example of self-rewriting, and Beckett’s of self-unwriting.

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In this essay I compare points of textual difference in the Calder, Grove, and Minuit editions of Samuel Beckett's Company/Compagnie and the Calder ‘Company’ of Nohow On, paying particular attention to post-publication word form variants. I attempt to differentiate points of divergence deliberately introduced into the texts by the author from errors introduced during the publication process and perpetuated throughout the different edition of these texts. I discuss six variants in detail and include an appendix with an additional eight variants.