Nabokov Perversely

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Nabokov, Perversely

Author : Eric Naiman
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 0801460239
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis Nabokov, Perversely by : Eric Naiman

Download or read book Nabokov, Perversely written by Eric Naiman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an original and provocative reading of Vladimir Nabokov's work and the pleasures and perils to which its readers are subjected, Eric Naiman explores the significance and consequences of Nabokov's insistence on bringing the issue of art's essential perversity to the fore. Nabokov's fiction is notorious for the interpretive panic it occasions in its readers, the sense that no matter how hard he or she tries, the reader has not gotten Nabokov "right." At the same time, the fictions abound with characters who might be labeled perverts, and questions of sexuality lurk everywhere. Naiman argues that the sexual and the interpretive are so bound together in Nabokov's stories and novels that the reader confronts the fear that there is no stable line between good reading and overreading, and that reading Nabokov well is beset by the exhilaration and performance anxiety more frequently associated with questions of sexuality than of literature. Nabokov's fictions pervert their readers, obligingly training them to twist and turn the text in order to puzzle out its meanings, so that they become not better people but closer readers, assuming all the impudence and potential for shame that sexually oriented close-looking entails. In Nabokov, Perversely, Naiman traces the connections between sex and interpretation in Lolita (which he reads as a perverse work of Shakespeare scholarship), Pnin, Bend Sinister, and Ada. He examines the roots of perverse reading in The Defense and charts the enhanced attention to the connection between sex and metafiction in works translated from the Russian. He also takes on books by other authors—such as Reading Lolita in Tehran—that misguidedly incorporate Nabokov's writing within frameworks of moral usefulness. In a final, extraordinary chapter, Naiman reads Dostoevsky's The Double with Nabokov-trained eyes, making clear the power a strong writer can exert on readers.

Nabokov's Eros and the Poetics of Desire

Author : M. Couturier
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137404590
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (374 download)

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Book Synopsis Nabokov's Eros and the Poetics of Desire by : M. Couturier

Download or read book Nabokov's Eros and the Poetics of Desire written by M. Couturier and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nabokov gained international fame with Lolita, a highly erotic and morally disturbing novel. Through its comprehensive study of the amorous and sexual behaviors of Nabokov's characters this book shows how Eros, both as a clown or a pervert, contributes to the poetic excellence of his novels and accounts for the unfolding of the plots.

Reimagining Nabokov

Author : José Vergara
Publisher : Amherst College Press
ISBN 13 : 1943208506
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (432 download)

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Book Synopsis Reimagining Nabokov by : José Vergara

Download or read book Reimagining Nabokov written by José Vergara and published by Amherst College Press. This book was released on 2023-02-03 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reimagining Nabokov: Pedagogies for the 21st Century, eleven teachers of Vladimir Nabokov describe how and why they teach this notoriously difficult, even problematic, writer to the next generations of students. Contributors offer fresh perspectives and embrace emergent pedagogical methods, detailing how developments in technology, translation and archival studies, and new interpretative models have helped them to address urgent questions of power, authority, and identity. Practical and insightful, this volume features exciting methods through which to reimagine the literature classroom as one of shared agency between students, instructors, and the authors they read together. "It is both timely and refreshing to have an influx of teacher-scholars who engage Nabokov from a variety of perspectives... this volume does justice to the breadth of Nabokov's literary achievements, and it does so with both pedagogical creativity and scholarly integrity."--Dana Dragunoiu, Carleton University "[A] valuable study for any reader, teacher, scholar, or student of Nabokov. Amongst specific and urgent insights on the potential for digital methods, the relevance of Nabokov for students today, and how to reconcile issues of identity with an author who disavowed history and politics, are much wider and timeless questions of authorial control and the ability to access reality."--Anoushka Alexander-Rose, Nabokov Online Journal Reimagining Nabokov takes a holistic approach to the many stumbling blocks in teaching Nabokov today. Especially intriguing about this volume is that through its essays a fresh picture of Nabokov emerges, not as an authoritarian and paranoid world-creator (an image long entrenched in Nabokov scholarship), but as someone who is tentative, hopeful, socially conscious, compassionate, and traumatized by the experience of exile....Reimagining Nabokov models pedagogical concepts that can be applied to teaching any literary text with a social conscience.--Alisa Ballard Lin, Modern Language Review Contributions by Galya Diment, Tim Harte, Robyn Jensen, Sara Karpukhin, Yuri Leving, Roman Utkin, José Vergara, Meghan Vicks, Olga Voronina, Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, and Matthew Walker.

Reader as Accomplice

Author : Alexander Spektor
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810142473
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Reader as Accomplice by : Alexander Spektor

Download or read book Reader as Accomplice written by Alexander Spektor and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 at the formal level. By doing so, these two authors ask us to consider and respond to the ethical demands that narrative acts of representation and interpretation place on authors and readers. Using the lens of narrative ethics, Alexander Spektor brings to light the important, previously unexplored correspondences between Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Ultimately, he argues for a productive comparison of how each writer investigates the ethical costs of narrating oneself and others. He also explores the power dynamics between author, character, narrator, and reader. In his readings of such texts as “The Meek One” and The Idiot by Dostoevsky and Bend Sinister and Despair by Nabokov, Spektor demonstrates that these authors incite the reader’s sense of ethics by exposing the risks but also the possibilities of narrative fiction.

Teaching Nabokov's Lolita in the #MeToo Era

Author : Elena Rakhimova-Sommers
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1793628394
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (936 download)

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Book Synopsis Teaching Nabokov's Lolita in the #MeToo Era by : Elena Rakhimova-Sommers

Download or read book Teaching Nabokov's Lolita in the #MeToo Era written by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita in the #MeToo Era seeks to critique the novel from the standpoint of its teachability to undergraduate and graduate studentsin the twenty-first century. The time has come to ask: in the #MeToo era and beyond, how do we approach Nabokov’s inflammatory masterpiece, Lolita? How do we read a novel that describes an unpardonable crime? How do we balance analysis of Lolita’s brilliant language and aesthetic complexity with due attention to its troubling content? This student-focused volume offers practical and specific answers to these questions and includes suggestions for teaching the novel in conventional and online modalities. Distinguished Nabokov scholars explore the multilayered nature of Lolita by sharing innovative assignments, creative-writing exercises, methodologies of teaching the novel through film and theatre, and new critical analyses and interpretations.

Art in Doubt

Author : Tatyana Gershkovich
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810145553
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Art in Doubt by : Tatyana Gershkovich

Download or read book Art in Doubt written by Tatyana Gershkovich and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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, and Nabokov, the aesthete—seem to have sharply conflicting ideas about the purpose of literature. Tatyana Gershkovich undermines this familiar opposition by identifying a shared fear at the root of their seemingly antithetical aesthetics: that one’s experience of the world might be entirely one’s own, private and impossible to share through art. Art in Doubt: Tolstoy, Nabokov, and the Problem of Other Minds reconceives the pair’s celebrated fiction and contentious theorizing as coherent, lifelong efforts to reckon with the problem of other people’s minds. Gershkovich demonstrates how the authors’ shared yearning for an impossibly intimate knowledge of others formed and deformed their fiction and brought them through parallel logic to their rival late styles: Tolstoy’s rustic simplicity and Nabokov’s baroque complexity. Unlike those authors for whom the skeptical predicament ends in absurdity or despair, Tolstoy and Nabokov both hold out hope that skepticism can be overcome, not by force of will but with the right kind of text, one designed to withstand our impulse to doubt it. Through close readings of key canonical works—Anna Karenina, The Kreutzer Sonata, Hadji Murat, The Gift, Pale Fire—this book brings the twin titans of Russian fiction to bear on contemporary debates about how we read now, and how we ought to.

All Future Plunges to the Past

Author : José Vergara
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501759914
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis All Future Plunges to the Past by : José Vergara

Download or read book All Future Plunges to the Past written by José Vergara and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All Future Plunges to the Past explores how Russian writers from the mid-1920s on have read and responded to Joyce's work. Through contextually rich close readings, José Vergara uncovers the many roles Joyce has occupied in Russia over the last century, demonstrating how the writers Yury Olesha, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, and Mikhail Shishkin draw from Joyce's texts, particularly Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, to address the volatile questions of lineages in their respective Soviet, émigré, and post-Soviet contexts. Interviews with contemporary Russian writers, critics, and readers of Joyce extend the conversation to the present day, showing how the debates regarding the Irish writer's place in the Russian pantheon are no less settled one hundred years after Ulysses. The creative reworkings, or "translations," of Joycean themes, ideas, characters, plots, and styles made by the five writers Vergara examines speak to shifting cultural norms, understandings of intertextuality, and the polarity between Russia and the West. Vergara illuminates how Russian writers have used Joyce's ideas as a critical lens to shape, prod, and constantly redefine their own place in literary history. All Future Plunges to the Past offers one overarching approach to the general narrative of Joyce's reception in Russian literature. While each of the writers examined responded to Joyce in an individual manner, the sum of their methods reveals common concerns. This subject raises the issue of cultural values and, more importantly, how they changed throughout the twentieth century in the Soviet Union, Russian emigration, and the post-Soviet Russian environment.

Vladimir Nabokov

Author : D. Rampton
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137292024
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (372 download)

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Book Synopsis Vladimir Nabokov by : D. Rampton

Download or read book Vladimir Nabokov written by D. Rampton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clearly written, insightful study of Nabokov the novelist, providing an expert analysis of the 17 novels he wrote during a career spanning more than 50 years: one of the most impressive, challenging, and controversial literary achievements of our time.

Nabokov and Nietzsche

Author : Michael Rodgers
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1501339591
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Nabokov and Nietzsche by : Michael Rodgers

Download or read book Nabokov and Nietzsche written by Michael Rodgers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-04-19 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nabokov and Nietzsche: Problems and Perspectives addresses the many knotted issues in the work of Vladimir Nabokov – Lolita's moral stance, Pnin's relationship with memory, Pale Fire's ambiguous internal authorship – that often frustrate interpretation. It does so by arguing that the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, as both a conceptual instrument and a largely unnoticed influence on Nabokov himself, can help to untie some of these knots. The study addresses the fundamental problems in Nabokov's writing that make his work perplexing, mysterious and frequently uneasy rather than simply focusing on the literary puzzles and games that, although inherent, do not necessarily define his body of work. Michael Rodgers shows that Nietzsche's philosophy provides new, but not always palatable, perspectives in order to negotiate interpretative impasses, and that the uneasy aspects of Nabokov's work offer the reader manifold rewards.

Transitional Nabokov

Author : Will Norman
Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9783039115259
Total Pages : 330 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (152 download)

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Book Synopsis Transitional Nabokov by : Will Norman

Download or read book Transitional Nabokov written by Will Norman and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2009 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays is concerned with one of the most important writers of the twentieth century: Vladimir Nabokov. The book features contributions from both well-established and new scholars, and represents the latest developments in research. The essays all address the possibility of reading Nabokov's works as operating between categories of various kinds - whether linguistic, formal, historical or national. In doing so, they explore exciting new paradigms for approaching Nabokov's oeuvre. The volume brings together a diverse range of critical voices from around the world, to respond to some of the most urgent questions raised about Nabokov's work. Topics covered include the relationship between his artistic and scientific work, his influences on contemporary fiction, and the development of his aesthetics over his career. Drawing variously on archive research, alternative readings of key texts, and fresh theoretical approaches, this book injects new impetus into Nabokov studies as it continues to evolve as a discipline.

Nabokov's Canon

Author : Marijeta Bozovic
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810133164
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Nabokov's Canon by : Marijeta Bozovic

Download or read book Nabokov's Canon written by Marijeta Bozovic and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964) and its accompanying Commentary, along with Ada, or Ardor (1969), his densely allusive late English language novel, have appeared nearly inscrutable to many interpreters of his work. If not outright failures, they are often considered relatively unsuccessful curiosities. In Bozovic's insightful study, these key texts reveal Nabokov's ambitions to reimagine a canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western masterpieces with Russian literature as a central, rather than marginal, strain. Nabokov's scholarly work, translations, and lectures on literature bear resemblance to New Critical canon reformations; however, Nabokov's canon is pointedly translingual and transnational and serves to legitimize his own literary practice. The new angles and theoretical framework offered by Nabokov's Canon help us to understand why Nabokov's provocative monuments remain powerful source texts for several generations of diverse international writers, as well as richly productive material for visual, cinematic, musical, and other artistic adaptations.

Nabokov Noir

Author : Luke Parker
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501766783
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Nabokov Noir by : Luke Parker

Download or read book Nabokov Noir written by Luke Parker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 palaces, cultural Americanism, and surface culture. Luke Parker argues that Nabokov's engagement with the cinema and the dynamics of mass culture more broadly is an art of exile, understood both as literary poetics and practical strategy. Obsessive and competitive, fascinated and disturbed, Nabokov's Russian-language fiction and essays, written in Berlin, present a compelling rethinking of modernist-era literature's relationship to an unabashedly mass cultural phenomenon. Parker examines how Nabokov's involvement with the cinema as actor, screenwriter, moviegoer, and, above all, chronicler of the cinematized culture of interwar Europe enabled him to flourish as a transnational writer. Nabokov, Parker shows, worked tirelessly to court publishers and film producers for maximum exposure for his fiction across languages, media, and markets. In revealing the story of Nabokov's cinema praxis—his strategic instrumentalization of the movie industry—Nabokov Noir reconstructs the deft response of a modern master to the artificial isolation and shrinking audiences of exile.

Nabokov's Women

Author : Elena Rakhimova-Sommers
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 1498503314
Total Pages : 275 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (985 download)

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Book Synopsis Nabokov's Women by : Elena Rakhimova-Sommers

Download or read book Nabokov's Women written by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nabokov’s Women: The Silent Sisterhood of Textual Nomads is the first book-length study to focus on Nabokov’s relationship with his heroines. Essays by distinguished Nabokov scholars explore the multilayered and nomadic nature of Nabokov’s women: their voice and voicelessness, their absentness, the paradigm of power and sacrifice within which they are situated, the paradox of their unattainability, their complex relationship with textual borders, the travel narrative, with the author himself. By design, Nabokov’s woman is often assigned a short-term tourist visa with a firm expiration date. Her departure is facilitated by death or involuntary absence, which watermarks her into the male protagonist’s narrative, granting him an artistic release or a gift of self-understanding. When she leaves the stage, her portrait remains ambiguous. She can be powerfully enigmatic, but not self-actualized enough to be dynamic or, for even where the terms of her existence are deeply considered or her image beheld reverently, her recognition seems to be limited to the “Works Cited” register of the male narrator’s personal life. As a result, Nabokov’s texts often feature a nomadic woman who seems to live without a narratorial homeland, papers of her own, or storytelling privileges. This volume explores the “residency status” of Nabokov’s silent nomads—his fleeting lovers, witches, muses, mermaids, and nymphets. As Nabokov scholars analyze the power dynamic of the writer’s narrative of male desire, they ponder—are these female characters directionless wanderers or covert operatives in the terrain of Nabokov’s text? Whereas each essay addresses a different aspect of Nabokov’s artistic relationship with the feminine, together they explore the politics of representation, authorization, and voicelessness. This collection offers new ways of reading and teaching Nabokov and is poised to appeal to a wide range of student and scholarly audiences. Chapter 4, "Nabokov's Mermaid: 'Spring in Fialta'" by Elena Rakhimova-Sommers, is not available in the ebook format due to digital rights restrictions. You can find the earlier version of the chapter in the journal Nabokov Studies.

Nabokov’s Secret Trees

Author : Stephen H. Blackwell
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
ISBN 13 : 1487554435
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (875 download)

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Book Synopsis Nabokov’s Secret Trees by : Stephen H. Blackwell

Download or read book Nabokov’s Secret Trees written by Stephen H. Blackwell and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2024-06-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 hidden ubiquity of trees, their essence as complex natural phenomena, and their role as quiet presences that have accompanied and fostered human civilization and art since their beginnings. The book uncovers how trees offer a rich and intricate field for structural, semantic, allusive, and metaphorical exploration. Based on the published corpus as well as archival materials, Nabokov’s Secret Trees demonstrates that trees not only populate Nabokov’s art in stunning, yet furtive, abundance, but also as mysterious natural entities, directly animating his works’ worlds and his readers’ experience of them.

Charlottengrad

Author : Roman Utkin
Publisher : University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN 13 : 0299344401
Total Pages : 293 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (993 download)

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Book Synopsis Charlottengrad by : Roman Utkin

Download or read book Charlottengrad written by Roman Utkin and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2023-08 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As many as half a million Russians lived in Germany in the 1920s, most of them in Berlin, clustered in and around the Charlottenburg neighborhood to such a degree that it became known as “Charlottengrad.” Traditionally, the Russian émigré community has been understood as one of exiles aligned with Imperial Russia and hostile to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet government that followed. However, Charlottengrad embodied a full range of personal and political positions vis-à-vis the Soviet project, from enthusiastic loyalty to questioning ambivalence and pessimistic alienation. By closely examining the intellectual output of Charlottengrad, Roman Utkin explores how community members balanced their sense of Russianness with their position in a modern Western city charged with artistic, philosophical, and sexual freedom. He highlights how Russian authors abroad engaged with Weimar-era cultural energies while sustaining a distinctly Russian perspective on modernist expression, and follows queer Russian artists and writers who, with their German counterparts, charted a continuous evolution in political and cultural attitudes toward both the Weimar and Soviet states. Utkin provides insight into the exile community in Berlin, which, following the collapse of the tsarist government, was one of the earliest to face and collectively process the peculiarly modern problem of statelessness. Charlottengrad analyzes the cultural praxis of “Russia Abroad” in a dynamic Berlin, investigating how these Russian émigrés and exiles navigated what it meant to be Russian—culturally, politically, and institutionally—when the Russia they knew no longer existed.

Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces

Author : Jacqueline Hamrit
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1443873020
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (438 download)

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Book Synopsis Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces by : Jacqueline Hamrit

Download or read book Authorship in Nabokov’s Prefaces written by Jacqueline Hamrit and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-01-12 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whereas literary criticism has mainly oscillated between “the death of the author” (Barthes) and “the return of the author” (Couturier), this work suggests another perspective on authorship through an analysis of Nabokov’s prefaces. It is here argued that the author, being neither dead nor tyrannical, alternates between authoritative apparitions and receding disappearances in the double gesture of mastery without mastery which Derrida calls ‘exappropriation’, that is, a simultaneous attempt to appropriate one’s work, control it, have it under one’s power and expropriate it, losing control by loosening one’s grip. The intention of this is to approach, through one’s experience of reading and interpreting, the experience of self-effacement and impersonality pertaining to writing (cf. Blanchot). Prefaces are considered to be suitable places for the deconstruction of the classical image of Nabokov’s arrogance through the unearthing of his reserve and vulnerability. This work provides an account of the mere intuition (which, therefore, does not pretend to be a conclusive and definitive interpretation) of another image of Nabokov whose undeniable talent for deception seems in accordance with a need for discretion and secrecy.

Nabokov and his Books

Author : Duncan White
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191081884
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Nabokov and his Books by : Duncan White

Download or read book Nabokov and his Books written by Duncan White and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-09 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the outbreak of the Second World War Vladimir Nabokov stood on the brink of losing everything all over again. The reputation he had built as the pre-eminent Russian novelist in exile was imperilled. In Nabokov and his Books, Duncan White shows how Nabokov went to America and not only reinvented himself as an American writer but also used the success of Lolita to rescue those Russian books that had been threatened by obscurity. Using previously unpublished and neglected material, White tells the story of Nabokov the professional writer and how he sought to balance his late modernist aesthetics with the demands of a booming American literary marketplace. As Nabokov's reputation grew so he took greater and greater control of how his books were produced, making the material form of the book--including forewords, blurbs, covers--part of the novel. In his later novels, including Pale Fire, Ada, and Transparent Things, the idea of the novelist losing control of his work became the subject of the novels themselves. These plots were replicated in Nabokov's own biography, as he discovered his inability to control the forces the market success of Lolita had unleashed. With new insights into Nabokov's life and work, this book reconceptualises the way we think about one of the most important and influential novelists of the twentieth century.