Samuel Beckett’s work is littered with ironic self-reflexive comments on presumed audience expectations that it should ultimately make explicable sense. An ample store of letters and anecdotes suggests Beckett’s own preoccupation with and resistance to similar interpretive mindsets. Yet until now such concerns have remained the stuff of scholarly footnotes and asides.

Beckett’s Imagined Interpreters and the Failures of Modernism addresses these issues head-on and investigates how Beckett’s ideas about who he writes for affect what he writes. What it finds speaks...