Ronan McDonald is the author of The Death of the Critic (2008). Born in Dublin and educated there and at the University of Oxford, he is now a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Reading and the Director of the Samuel Beckett International Foundation. His other books include Tragedy and Irish Literature (2002) and The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett (2007) together with numerous essays and articles. He has written for national newspapers, including The Observer, The Guardian and The Irish Times and is a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement. He is currently working on a book on Darwinism and Degeneration in Irish Modernism. He has an ongoing interest in the ‘values’ of literary criticism and is organizing a conference on this topic to be held in Reading in Spring 2010.