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This volume reproduces 154 of Russian-American novelist and entomologist Vladimir Nabokov's drawings, few of which have ever been seen in public, and presents essays by ten leading scientists and Nabokov scholars. The contributors underscore the significance of Nabokov's drawings as scientific documents, evaluate his visionary contributions to evolutionary biology and systematics, and offer insights into his unique artistic perception and creativity. Showcasing color drawings of butterflies' distinctive markings and anatomy as well, all as part of his work at the American Museum of Natural History and Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology.
In nearly all his literary works, Vladimir Nabokov inscribed networks of trees to create meaningful patterns of significance around one or more of his passionate interests – in consciousness, memory, creativity, epistemology, ethics, and love, with a deep connection to nature serving as a constant undercurrent. Nabokov’s Secret Trees explores this neglected area of his art, one that positions nature as a hidden but vital core of his work. The book presents an entirely new, previously unsuspected Nabokov, one who crafts intricate patterns of arboreal imagery lurking behind his often-baroque psychological narratives. It reveals how Nabokov activates arboreal potentials by exploring the hid...
One of the century's greatest Russian novels, Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift still continues to baffle new readers with its playfully unstable narration, its temporal shifts, and its huge inserted opus, The Life of Chernyshevski. This study, the first monograph on Nabokov's last Russian novel, explores the connections between the narrative's structural difficulties and its most pressing thematic concerns: love and self-transcendence. In a departure from traditional approaches to The Gift, Blackwell places Zina's role as a loving, collaborating audience at the very center of the novel's significance. This non-heroine, according to Nabokov, turns out to constitute a vital part of the narrative perspective, a fact with significant repercussions for the novel's consideration of art's meaning within human existence and beyond.
Most famous as a literary artist, Vladimir Nabokov was also a professional biologist and a lifelong student of science. By exploring the refractions of physics, psychology, and biology within his art and thought, The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and the Worlds of Science, by Stephen H. Blackwell, demonstrates how aesthetic sensibilities contributed to Nabokov's scientific work, and how his scientific passions shape, inform, and permeate his fictions. Nabokov's attention to holistic study and inductive empirical work gradually reinforced his underlying suspicion of mechanistic explanations of nature. He perceived chilling parallels between the overconfidence of scientific progress and...
Modern Greek national and cultural identities consist, to a considerable extent, of clusters of cultural memory, shaped by an ongoing dialogue with the classical past. Within this dialogue between modern Greece and classical antiquity, Greek tragedy takes pride of place. In this volume, ten scholars from Cyprus, Greece, the United Kingdom and the United States explore the various ways in which Greek tragedy and tragic myth have been reimagined and rewritten in modern Greek drama and poetry. The book’s extensive coverage includes major modern Greek authors, such as Cavafy, Seferis, and Ritsos, as well as less well-known, but equally rich and rewarding, 20th- and 21st-century texts.
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A Handbook to the Reception of Greek Drama offers a series of original essays that represent a comprehensive overview of the global reception of ancient Greek tragedies and comedies from antiquity to the present day. Represents the first volume to offer a complete overview of the reception of ancient drama from antiquity to the present Covers the translation, transmission, performance, production, and adaptation of Greek tragedy from the time the plays were first created in ancient Athens through the 21st century Features overviews of the history of the reception of Greek drama in most countries of the world Includes chapters covering the reception of Greek drama in modern opera and film
This volume explores film and television sources in problematic conversation with classical antiquity, to better understand the nature of artistic reception and classical reception in particular. Drawing inspiration from well-theorized fields like adaptation studies, comparative literature, and film, the essays in this collection raise questions fundamental to the future of reception studies. The first section, ‘Beyond Fidelity’, deals with idiosyncratic adaptations of ancient sources; the second section, ‘Beyond Influence’, discusses modern works purporting to adapt ancient figures or themes that are less straightforwardly ancient than they may at first appear; while the last section, ‘Beyond Original’, uses films that lack even these murky connections to antiquity to challenge the notion that studying reception requires establishing historical connections between works. As questions of audience, interpretation, and subjectivity are central to most contemporary fields of study, this is a collection that is of interest to a wide variety of readers in the humanities.
Bess of Hardwick's Letters is the first book-length study of the c. 250 letters to and from the remarkable Elizabethan dynast, matriarch and builder of houses Bess of Hardwick (c. 1527–1608). By surveying the complete correspondence, author Alison Wiggins uncovers the wide range of uses to which Bess put letters: they were vital to her engagement in the overlapping realms of politics, patronage, business, legal negotiation, news-gathering and domestic life. Much more than a case study of Bess's letters, the discussions of language, handwriting and materiality found here have fundamental implications for the way we approach and read Renaissance letters. Wiggins offers readings which show ho...