Nabokov s Pale Fire

Pale Fire is regarded by many as Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece. The novel has been hailed as one of the most striking early examples of postmodernism and has become a famous test case for theories about reading because of the apparent impossibility of deciding between several radically different interpretations. Does the book have two narrators, as it first appears, or one? How much is fantasy and how much is reality? Whose fantasy and whose reality are they? Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer and hitherto the foremost proponent of the idea that Pale Fire has one narrator, John Shade, now rejects this position and presents a new and startlingly different solution that will permanently shift the nature of critical debate on the novel. Boyd argues that the book does indeed have two narrators, Shade and Charles Kinbote, but reveals that Kinbote had some strange and highly surprising help in writing his sections. In light of this interpretation, Pale Fire now looks distinctly less postmodern--and more interesting than ever. In presenting his arguments, Boyd shows how Nabokov designed Pale Fire for readers to make surprising discoveries on a first reading and even more surprising discoveries on subsequent readings by following carefully prepared clues within the novel. Boyd leads the reader step-by-step through the book, gradually revealing the profound relationship between Nabokov's ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics. If Nabokov has generously planned the novel to be accessible on a first reading and yet to incorporate successive vistas of surprise, Boyd argues, it is because he thinks a deep generosity lies behind the inexhaustibility, complexity, and mystery of the world. Boyd also shows how Nabokov's interest in discovery springs in part from his work as a scientist and scholar, and draws comparisons between the processes of readerly and scientific discovery. This is a profound, provocative, and compelling reinterpretation of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

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Pale Fire

A novel constructed around the last great poem of a fictional American poet, John Shade, and an account of his death. The poem appears in full and the narrative develops through the lengthy, and increasingly eccentric, notes by his posthumous editor.

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PALE FIRE

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Reading the Transtextual in Vladimir Nabokov s Pale Fire A S Byatt s Babel Tower and Henry James s The Figure in the Carpet

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The Art of Imaginative Appropriation in Vladimir Nabokov s Lolita and Pale Fire

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Reality and Art in Nabokov s Novels

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Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies

New and original collection of scholarly essays examining the literary complexities of the Atlantic world systemThis Companion offers a critical overview of the diverse and dynamic field of Atlantic literary studies, with contributions by distinguished scholars on a series of topics that define the area. The essays focus on literature and culture from first contact to the present, exploring fruitful Atlantic connections across space and time, across national cultures, and embracing literature, culture and society. This research collection proposes that the analysis of literature and culture does not depend solely upon geographical setting to uncover textual meaning. Instead, it offers Atlantic connections based around migration, race, gender and sexuality, ecologies, and other significant ideological crossovers in the Atlantic World. The result is an exciting new critical map written by leading international researchers of a lively and expanding field. Key FeaturesOffers an introduction to the growing field of Atlantic literary studies by showcasing current work engaged in debate around historical, cultural and literary issues in the Atlantic WorldIncludes 26 newly-commissioned scholarly essays by leading experts in Atlantic literary studiesFuses breadth of historical knowledge with depth of literary scholarshipConsiders the full range of intercultural encounters around and across the Atlantic Ocean

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Stalking Nabokov

At the age of twenty-one, Brian Boyd wrote a thesis on Vladimir Nabokov that the famous author called "brilliant." After gaining exclusive access to the writer's archives, he wrote a two-part, award-winning biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991). This collection features essays written by Boyd since completing the biography, incorporating material he gleaned from his research as well as new discoveries and formulations. Boyd confronts Nabokov's life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, and affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd offers new ways of reading Nabokov's best English-language works: Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, and he discloses otherwise unknown information about the author's world. Sharing his personal reflections, Boyd recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov's biography and his unusual finds in the archives, including materials still awaiting publication. The first to focus on Nabokov's metaphysics, Boyd cautions against their being used as the key to unlock all of the author's secrets, showing instead the many other rooms in Nabokov's castle of fiction that need exploring, such as his humor, narrative invention, and psychological insight into characters and readers alike. Appreciating Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd helps us understand more than ever the author's multifaceted genius.

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Crystal Land Artifice in Nabokov s English Novels

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Vladimir Nabokov

This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

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Nabokov s Personal Demons in the Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Pale Fire

An analysis of Vladimir Nabokov's personal demons—powerful feelings of guilt and loss—that are manifested in two of his most famous novels.

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Nabokov s Shakespeare

Nabokov's Shakespeare is a comprehensive study of an important and interesting literary relationship. It explores the many and deep ways in which the works of Shakespeare, the greatest writer of the English language, penetrate the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, one of the finest English prose stylists of the twentieth century. As a Russian youth, Nabokov read all of Shakespeare, in English. He claimed a shared birthday with the Bard, and some of his most highly regarded novels (Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada) are infused with Shakespeare and Shakespeareanisms. Nabokov uses Shakespeare and Shakespeare's works in a surprisingly wide variety of ways, from the most casual references to deep thematic links. Schuman provides a taxonomy of Nabokov's Shakespeareanisms; a quantitative analysis of Shakespeare in Nabokov; an examination of Nabokov's Russian works, his early English novels, the non-novelistic writings (poetry, criticism, stories), Nabokov's major works, and his final novels; and a discussion of the nature of literary relationships and influence. With a Foreword by Brian Boyd.

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Nabokov and His Fiction

In this 1999 collection, eleven leading scholars offer original essays on Nabokov and his fiction.

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The Idea of North

North is the point we look for on a map to orient ourselves. It is also the direction taken throughout history by the adventurous, the curious, the solitary, and the foolhardy. Based in the North himself, Peter Davidson, in The Idea of North, explores the very concept of "north" through its many manifestations in painting, legend, and literature. Tracing a northbound route from rural England—whose mild climate keeps it from being truly northern—to the wind-shorn highlands of Scotland, then through Scandinavia and into the desolate, icebound Arctic Circle, Davidson takes the reader on a journey from the heart of society to its most far-flung outposts. But we never fully leave civilization behind; rather, it is our companion on his alluring ramble through the north in art and story. Davidson presents a north that is haunted by Moomintrolls and the ghosts of long-lost Arctic explorers but at the same time, somehow, home to the fragile beauty of a Baltic midsummer evening. He sets the Icelandic Sagas, Nabokov's snowy fictional kingdom of Zembla, and Hans Christian Andersen's cryptic, forbidding Snow Queen alongside the works of such artists as Eric Ravilious, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Andy Goldsworthy, demonstrating how each illuminates a different facet of humanity's relationship to the earth's most dangerous and austere terrain. Through the lens of Davidson's easy erudition and astonishing range of reference, we come to see that the north is more a goal than a place, receding always before us, just over the horizon, past the last town, off the edge of the map. True north may be unreachable, but The Idea of North brings intrepid readers closer than ever before.

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Pale Fire

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Pale Fire

At the heart of Nabokov's Pale Fire beats a 999-line poem, penned by its fictional hero, John Shade. This first-ever facsimile edition of the poem shows it to be a masterpiece of American poetry, albeit by an invented persona. This box contains two booklets - the poem "Pale Fire" in a pocket edition and the book of essays by Boyd and Gwynn - as well as facsimiles of the index cards that John Shade used for composing his poem, printed as Nabokov described them.

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Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), the eminent Russian-American writer and intellectual, is best known for his novels, though he was also the author of plays, poems, and short stories. In this important new work, Paul D. Morris offers a comprehensive reading of Nabokov's Russian and English poetry, until now a neglected facet of his oeuvre. Morris' unique and insightful study re-evaluates Nabokov's poetry and demonstrates that poetry was in fact central to his identity as an author and was the source of his distinctive authorial - lyric - voice. After offering a critical overview of the multi-staged history of the reception of Nabokov's poetry and an extensive analysis of his poetic writing, Morris argues that Nabokov's poetry has largely been misinterpreted and its place in his oeuvre misunderstood. Through a detailed examination of the form and content of Nabokov's writings, Morris demonstrates that Nabokov's innovations in the realms of drama, the short story, and the novel were profoundly shaped by his lyric sensibility.

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Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis

This is a collection of psychoanalytical essays on a broad spectrum of well-known Russian authors, such as Puskin, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Belyj, Tjutcev, Axmatova, and Nabokov. The volume includes some reprints, among which a contribution by Sigmund Freud on Dostoevsky and Parricide'. The majority of the contributions are original publications by present-day specialists in the field. This is a book which may benefit literary scholars as well as professional psychoanalysts.

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Nabokov s Otherworld

A major reexamination of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov as "literary gamesman," this book systematically shows that behind his ironic manipulation of narrative and his puzzle-like treatment of detail there lies an aesthetic rooted in his intuition of a transcendent realm and in his consequent redefinition of "nature" and "artifice" as synonyms. Beginning with Nabokov's discursive writings, Vladimir Alexandrov finds his world view centered on the experience of epiphany--characterized by a sudden fusion of varied sensory data and memories, a feeling of timelessness, and an intuition of immortality--which grants the true artist intimations of an "otherworld." Readings of The Defense, Invitation to a Beheading, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita, and Pale Fire reveal the epiphanic experience to be a touchstone for the characters' metaphysical insightfulness, moral makeup, and aesthetic sensibility, and to be a structural model for how the narratives themselves are fashioned and for the nature of the reader's involvement with the text. In his conclusion, Alexandrov outlines several of Nabokov's possible intellectual and artistic debts to the brilliant and variegated culture that flourished in Russia on the eve of the Revolution. Nabokov emerges as less alienated from Russian culture than most of his emigre readers believed, and as less "modernist" than many of his Western readers still imagine. "Alexandrov's work is distinctive in that it applies an `otherworld' hypothesis as a consistent context to Nabokov's novels. The approach is obviously a fruitful one. Alexandrov is innovative in rooting Nabokov's ethics and aesthetics in the otherwordly and contributes greatly to Nabokov studies by examining certain key terms such as `commonsense,' `nature,' and `artifice.' In general Alexandrov's study leads to a much clearer understanding of Nabokov's metaphysics."--D. Barton Johnson, University of California, Santa Barbara Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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Enchantment and Coincidence

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