Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play - Rilegato

Karshan, Thomas

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0199603987 ISBN 13: 9780199603985

Casa editrice: OUP Oxford, 2011

Riassunto

In a speech given in December 1925, Vladimir Nabokov declared that 'everything in the world plays', including 'love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns.' All of Nabokov's novels contain scenes of games: chess, scrabble, cards, football, croquet, tennis, and boxing, the play of light and the play of thought, the play of language, of forms, and of ideas, children's games, cruel games of exploitation, and erotic play.

Thomas Karshan argues that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and that Nabokov's novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments of play ever achieved. He traces the idea of art as play back to German aesthetics, and shows how Nabokov's aesthetic outlook was formed by various Russian émigré writers who espoused those aesthetics. Karshan then follows Nabokov's exploration of play as subject and style through his whole oeuvre, outlining the relation of play to other important themes such as faith, make-believe, violence, freedom, order, work, Marxism, desire, childhood, art, and scholarship. As he does so, he demonstrates a series of new literary sources, contexts, and parallels for Nabokov's writing, in writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Nietzsche, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Bely, the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, Pope, and the humanist tradition of the literary game.

Drawing in detail on Nabokov's untranslated early essays and poems, and on highly restricted archival material, Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play provides the fullest scholarly-critical reading of Nabokov to date, and defines the ludic aspect of his work that has been such a vital example for, and influence on, contemporary writers, from Orhan Pamuk, W. G. Sebald, and Georges Perec, to John Updike, Martin Amis, and Tom Stoppard. Through Nabokov, it addresses the literary game-playing that is one of the most distinctive elements in post-1945 literature.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

Thomas Karshan is one of the finest Nabokov critics of his generation. (The Slavonic and East European Review)

[A] book of many rich and transformative observations of Nabokov's work and about literature generally; it is essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century literature. (Slavic and East European Journal)

Nabokov scholars will applaud Karshan's grand return to a theme long ignored for having seemed obvious. His monograph is scholarship of the first water ... an imperative read for scholars, for Karshan's imaginative flight encompasses almost all of Nabokov's texts, discovering a new arc by which to trace the writer's fifty-year career. His study makes excellent play of the work behind it. (John Kopper, Russian Review)

Full of Nabokov's play, and is as considered a treatment of this vital aspect of Nabokov's artistry as could be wished for. (Stephen Abell, Times Literary Supplement)

[a] penetrating, omniscient book (New Statesman)

L'autore:

Thomas Karshan is a Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia, and prior to that was a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard, a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford, and a Leverhulme Research Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the co-translator of Nabokov's first major work, The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, a five-act play, and the editor of Nabokov's Collected Poems. He has written for the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Essays in Criticism, Modernism / Modernity, and Nabokov Studies.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: OUP Oxford
• Data di pubblicazione: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0199603987
• ISBN 13: 9780199603985
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 282