- Comparative Literature, Aesthetics, Vladimir Nabokov, English, Letters, English Literature, and 26 moreCritical Theory, Play, Literature of nonsense, Nonsense, Friedrich Nietzsche, Evolutionary Psychology, Russian Literature, Games, Aesthetics and Ethics, Satire & Irony, Alexander Pope, Lewis Carroll, Play Theory, Friedrich Schiller, History of Chess, Finnegans Wake, Marxist Aesthetics, Art of Russian Emigration, Kantian aesthetics, Lyric poetry, Epistolary literature, Virgil, Essay, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Essays, and John Updikeedit
What is an essay, and how did the essay emerge as a literary form? What are the continuities and surprising emergences across its history, from Montaigne’s 1580 Essais to the present? This volume assembles seventeen essays which address... more
What is an essay, and how did the essay emerge as a literary form? What are the continuities and surprising emergences across its history, from Montaigne’s 1580 Essais to the present? This volume assembles seventeen essays which address patterns and oddities in the history of the genre, paying attention both to the transformed legacies of the earliest essayists across the centuries, and to the form’s contemporary vibrancy. Contributors, both scholars and essayists, draw out paradoxes of what is considered the fourth genre, often overshadowed in literary history and criticism by fiction, poetry, and drama. The essay is at once a pedagogical tool, and a refusal of the technical languages of universities and professions; politically engaged but retired and independent; erudite and anti-pedantic; occasional and enduring; intimate and oratorical; allusive and idiosyncratic. The volume shows the essay as an ambassador between philosophy and public life, learnedness and experience. Since it is a form of writing against which academic work has defined itself, there has been surprisingly little scholarship on the history of the essay. On Essays addresses this dearth, not as a history or companion, but through a series of studies of major themes across the history of the genre.
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On the promises and perils of postal democracy, from Walt Whitman to Louis DeJoy
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In her 1927 essay ‘Street-Haunting’, Virginia Woolf rambles across the history of the essay, realising various metaphors which the essay has offered for itself. Being miscellaneous and anti-methodical, essays resist being placed... more
In her 1927 essay ‘Street-Haunting’, Virginia Woolf rambles across the history of the essay, realising various metaphors which the essay has offered for itself. Being miscellaneous and anti-methodical, essays resist being placed generically or defined theoretically, while for these very reasons they are always required to explain themselves. The diverse and paradoxical answers which essayists have given as often as not derive from the meaning of the word essai in Montaigne or from his account of his writings, and give rise to metaphors which have in turn shaped the subjects of the essay over the centuries. The thirteen descriptions of the essay here brought to a focus through Woolf’s essay are that the essay is a destroyer of generic categories, an apprenticeship, a haunting, a room of one’s own, homework, a bookshop, an assay, a taste, a ramble, an assault, a deformity, a sport, and everything and nothing.
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This introduction addresses problems in the history of the essay, and criticism and scholarship on it. Although the essay’s origin is easy to date – Montaigne’s Essais (1580) was the first book of that title – it is notoriously difficult... more
This introduction addresses problems in the history of the essay, and criticism and scholarship on it. Although the essay’s origin is easy to date – Montaigne’s Essais (1580) was the first book of that title – it is notoriously difficult to define; and there is remarkably little scholarship and criticism on it. This introduction asks why, offering a prehistory in Plutarch, Seneca, miscellaneous writing, and commonplacing; examining the metaphorical range of the term ‘essay’, and various other names for the form; exploring the transformation of Montaigne’s legacy in England; surveying criticism on the essay; and exploring the contradictions in its use in pedagogy. Rather than attempting a definition, the introduction explores how the essay resists one, exposing a sequence of contradictions which anticipate the subsequent chapters: that the essay can be institutional or amateurish; methodical or anti-methodical; artistic or scientific; detached or polemical; intimate or formal; sociab...
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In her 1927 essay ‘Street-Haunting’, Virginia Woolf rambles across the history of the essay, realising various metaphors which the essay has offered for itself. Being miscellaneous and anti-methodical, essays resist being placed... more
In her 1927 essay ‘Street-Haunting’, Virginia Woolf rambles across the history of the essay, realising various metaphors which the essay has offered for itself. Being miscellaneous and anti-methodical, essays resist being placed generically or defined theoretically, while for these very reasons they are always required to explain themselves. The diverse and paradoxical answers which essayists have given as often as not derive from the meaning of the word essai in Montaigne or from his account of his writings, and give rise to metaphors which have in turn shaped the subjects of the essay over the centuries. The thirteen descriptions of the essay here brought to a focus through Woolf’s essay are that the essay is a destroyer of generic categories, an apprenticeship, a haunting, a room of one’s own, homework, a bookshop, an assay, a taste, a ramble, an assault, a deformity, a sport, and everything and nothing.
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This chapter argues that New Yorker humorist John Updike was able to develop a fifth column position by drawing upon discontents already implicit in New Yorker humour. In its cartoons and light verse, Updike found a humorous cloud of... more
This chapter argues that New Yorker humorist John Updike was able to develop a fifth column position by drawing upon discontents already implicit in New Yorker humour. In its cartoons and light verse, Updike found a humorous cloud of secular anxiety which he could distil, with deceptive courtesy, into an internal critique of The New Yorker's culture. Cartoons showing savages acting like Manhattanites, or vice versa, betrayed a sense of the hidden affinity between civilisation and the discontented primitive instincts; cartoons about cannibals, the fearful possibility that life was a violent matter of survival; cartoons about urban anxiety, the false support of work, and works; while light verse playing on speed and slowness hinted at an underlying desire to see in a human life an unmodern norm of shape and pace.
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All students write essays, at school and university. But what is an essay, and how did it emerge as a literary form? It occupies an unsettling position, being both a form of literature and a style of knowledge. It is the fourth literary... more
All students write essays, at school and university. But what is an essay, and how did it emerge as a literary form? It occupies an unsettling position, being both a form of literature and a style of knowledge. It is the fourth literary genre, long over-shadowed in literary history by fiction, poetry, and drama; yet it is also a way of writing about any subject which rejects the methodical languages of universities and professions. The essay is an ambassador between literature and knowledge, expertise and experience, and brings together all the various conversations which do not usually come into dialogue with one another. In the twenty-first century, essays have once again become a vivid part of the literary landscape, with essayists and writers of lyric prose such as Claudia Rankine, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Maggie Nelson widely read and reviewed. Perhaps because it is a form of writing against which literary scholarship has defined itself, there has been surprisingly little scholars...
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Morn, a masked king, rules over a realm to which he has restored order after a violent revolution. Secretly in love with Midia, the wife of a banished revolutionary, Morn finds himself facing renewed bloodshed and disaster when... more
Morn, a masked king, rules over a realm to which he has restored order after a violent revolution. Secretly in love with Midia, the wife of a banished revolutionary, Morn finds himself facing renewed bloodshed and disaster when Midia's husband returns, provoking a duel and the return of chaos that Morn has fought so hard to prevent. The first major work of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and Pnin, The Tragedy of Mister Morn is translated and published in English here for the first time, and is a moving study of the elusiveness of happiness, the power of imagination and the eternal battle between truth and fantasy.
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Co-authored with Anastasia Tolstoy, this is the first translation into English of Vladimir Nabokov's first major work, the five-act Shakespearean verse-play, The Tragedy of Mister Morn, written by Nabokov in 1923 to 1924. This play... more
Co-authored with Anastasia Tolstoy, this is the first translation into English of Vladimir Nabokov's first major work, the five-act Shakespearean verse-play, The Tragedy of Mister Morn, written by Nabokov in 1923 to 1924. This play was published for the first time in Russian in 1997, in a magazine, and in book-form for the first time in 2008. Tolstoy and Karshan have translated the play's strict pentameter into a loose five-stress line, attempting to achieve a maximum of accuracy to the Russian while producing a convincing English verse-play with persuasively characterised voices; as such they looked closely at Nabokov's own English and tried to replicate his relationship with Shakespeare - in the way that Nabokov sought, in his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin into English, to give a sense of how Pushkin's Russian develops out of his reading of earlier English and French verse. They returned to Shakespeare to find the words and phrases they believed Naboko...
In the last fifteen years, there has been a modest Bunin revival, capped by the two new translations under review. Though they may not prove that Bunin was a major talent, they do show that he remains a figure of considerable interest.... more
In the last fifteen years, there has been a modest Bunin revival, capped by the two new translations under review. Though they may not prove that Bunin was a major talent, they do show that he remains a figure of considerable interest. The debates in Western Marxism about the ...
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Nabokov's most explicit expression of his lifelong fascination with games is his December 1925 essay, "Breitensträter Paolino," which begins with the claim that "Everything in the world plays." In the same... more
Nabokov's most explicit expression of his lifelong fascination with games is his December 1925 essay, "Breitensträter Paolino," which begins with the claim that "Everything in the world plays." In the same month, however, he published a short story, "A Guide to Berlin," ...
