How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this...

Leo Tolstoy’s and Vladimir Nabokov’s radically opposed aesthetic worldviews emanate from a shared intuition—that approaching a text skeptically is easy, but trusting it is hard Two figures central to the Russian literary tradition—Tolstoy, the moralist,...

Reader as Accomplice: Narrative Ethics in Dostoevsky and Nabokov argues that Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Nabokov seek to affect the moral imagination of their readers by linking morally laden plots to the ethical questions raised by narrative fiction...

Winner, 2022 Brian Boyd Prize for Best Second Book on Nabokov This book shows how ethics and aesthetics interact in the works of one of the most celebrated literary stylists of the twentieth century: the Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Dana...

A captivating portrait of futurist artist Iliazd infused with the reflections of his accidental biographer on the stickiness of the genre.The poet Ilia Zdanevich, known in his professional life as Iliazd, began his career in the pre-Revolutionary...

A collection of engaging essays that seeks to uniquely reperiodize American literature.It is all but inevitable for literary history to be divided into periods. "Early American," "antebellum," "modern," "post-1945"—such designations organize our...

A new view of the way modernist fiction writers tried to solve the problem of time.Do our fictions transform time? Do they cultivate the temporal environment? Such was the hope—or the fantasy—at work in many modernist novels for which time was not only...

This volume provides new historical and literary insights into the Harlem Renaissance, returning attention to it not only as a broad expression of artistic work but also as a movement that found catharsis in art and hope in resistance.By examining such...

The adventures and attitudes shared by the American writers dubbed "the lost generation", are brought to life in this book of prose works. Feeling alienated in the America of the 1920s, Fitzgerald, Crane, Hemingway, Wilder, Dos Passos, Cowley and others...

A renowned scholar's reflections on the romantic period, its disparate participants, and our unacknowledged debt to them With his usual wit and élan, esteemed historian Peter Gay enters the contentious, long-standing debates over the romantic period...

An engaging series of reflections on the literary landscape of our time -- from the writings of Roland Barthes to those of Stephen King -- Wood explores such issues as the shift of interest from novel to story, the blurring of the line between fiction...

What does literature know? Does it offer us knowledge of its own or does it only interrupt and question other forms of knowledge? This book answers and prolongs these questions through the close examination of individual works and the exploration of a...

How did a nation so famously associated with freedom become internationally identified with imprisonment? After the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and in the midst of a dramatically escalating prison population, the question is particularly...

David Plante's dazzling portraits of three influential women in the literary world, now back in print for the first time in decades.Difficult Women presents portraits of three extraordinary, complicated, and, yes, difficult women, while also raising...

The acclaimed author presents his unique insights into the works of great Russian authors including Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Gogol, Gorki, and Chekhov. In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought...

"From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a personal and provocative exploration of how technology companies have reshaped human language, and, if we let them, could steal it from us When it was released to the public in...

Nabokov Noir places Vladimir Nabokov's early literary career--from the 1920s to the 1940s--in the context of his fascination with silent and early sound cinema and the chiaroscuro darkness and artificial brightness of the Weimar era, with its movie...

Vladimir Nabokov described the literature course he taught at Cornell as "a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures." Leona Toker here pursues a similar investigation of the enigmatic structures of Nabokov's own fiction...