Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Thomas Karshan

Anastasia Tolstoy

Traces the experiences of an incognito king whose love for a revolutionary's wife ignites the chaos he has fought to prevent, forcing him to confront the lines between truth and fantasy.

The Tragedy of Mr. Morn

Kathryn Murphy

Montaigne called it a ramble; Chesterton the joke of literature; and Hume an ambassador between the worlds of learning and of conversation. But what is an essay, and how did it emerge as a literary form? What are the continuities and contradictions across its history, from Montaigne's 1580 Essais through the familiar intimacies of the Romantic essay, and up to more recent essayists such as Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Claudia Rankine? Sometimes called the fourth genre, the essay has been over-shadowed in literary history by fiction, poetry, and drama, and has proved notoriously resistant to definition. On Essays reveals in the essay a pattern of paradox: at once a pedagogical tool and a refusal of the methodical languages of universities and professions; politically engaged but retired and independent; erudite and anti-pedantic; occasional and enduring; intimate and oratorical; allusive and idiosyncratic. Perhaps because it is a form of writing against which literary scholarship has defined itself, there has been surprisingly little work on the tradition of the essay. Neither a comprehensive history nor a student companion, On Essays is a series of seventeen elegantly written essays on authors and aspects in the history of the genre — essays which, taken together, form the most substantial book yet published on the essay in Britain and America.

Montaigne to the Present

On Essays

The Presence of Pope in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire

In a 1925 speech, Nabokov declared that 'everything in the world plays', including 'love, nature, the arts, and domestic puns.' Thomas Karshan draws on untranslated early writings and restricted archival material to argue that play is Nabokov's signature theme, and that his novels form one of the most sophisticated treatments of play ever achieved.

Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play

Sets out in a new and authoritative way the history of the essay; explains how the essay has come to mean what it does, surveys the widely various incarnations of the form, offers new accounts of major essayists in English, and traces a wide range of significant themes.

Thomas Karshan

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