Steven Matthews

Steven Matthews is a scholar of twentieth-century literature and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. His main research interests are modernism and its aftermaths, and modern and contemporary British, Irish and American poetry. He has also published on Samuel Beckett, writing of the 1930s, and postcolonial poetry.

His works include Yeats as Precursor (2000); a study of the Australian poet Les Murray (2001); Modernism (2004); Modernism: A Sourcebook (2008); T. S. Eliot and the Early Modern Literature (Oxford University Press, 2013); and Ceaseless Music, on Wordsworth's The Prelude (2017). He is also a poet, with the collections Skying (2012) and On Magnetism (2017). He has served as series editor of Contexts in Literature and Sourcebooks for Literature.

In Beckett studies, he co-edited Samuel Beckett's Philosophy Notes with Matthew Feldman (Oxford University Press, 2020). The volume publishes Beckett's notes on the history of philosophy and is important for understanding how his writing relates to the philosophical tradition.

In Beckett and Cioran (Elements in Beckett Studies, Cambridge University Press, 2024), he examines Beckett's relationship with the Romanian-born thinker Emil Cioran. He traces it mainly through Beckett's engagement with Cioran's writings from the 1950s to the 1970s, rather than through biographical detail alone. He argues that Cioran's notions of the "métèque" (the resident outsider) and his philosophical scepticism resonate with Beckett's later prose, including Texts for Nothing and How It Is. He also considers Beckett's choices in translating between English and French, and shows how the questions of identity and understanding shared by these two settlers in Paris illuminate each other.