Our new Literature catalog includes an unguarded look into the mind of Vladimir Nabokov, an examination of simultaneous absorption in and critical distance from a work of art, a study of poetry and community through the use of the word “we,” and much more.
If you’ll be at MLA 2018 in New York this weekend, stop by Booths 122-123 to see our full range of recent literature titles. We will toast new publications and award winners at a booth reception on January 5th at 4:30pm.
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In October 1964, Vladimir Nabokov, a lifelong insomniac, began a curious experiment. Over the next eighty days, immediately upon waking, he wrote down his dreams, following the instructions he found in An Experiment with Time by the British philosopher John Dunne. The purpose was to test the theory that time may go in reverse, so that, paradoxically, a later event may generate an earlier dream. The result—published in its entirety for the first time—is a fascinating record of sixty-four dreams (and subsequent daytime episodes) that afford a rare glimpse of the artist at his most private.
Insomniac Dreams also includes previously unpublished records of Nabokov’s dreams from his letters and notebooks, and explores important connections between his fiction and private writings on dreams and time.
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When you are half lost in a work of art, what happens to the half left behind? Semi-Detached delves into this state of being: what it means to be within and without our social and physical milieu, at once interacting and drifting away, and how it affects our ideas about aesthetics. John Plotz focuses on Victorian and early modernist writers and artists who understood their work as tapping into, amplifying, or giving shape to a suspended duality of experience.
In a time of cyber-dependency and virtual worlds, when it seems that attention to everyday reality is stretching thin, this book takes a historical and critical look at the halfway-thereness that artists and audiences have long comprehended and embraced in their aesthetic encounters.
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The Plural of Us is the first book to focus on the poet’s use of the first-person plural voice—poetry’s “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden along with other major poets, Bonnie Costello uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying “I,” “we” has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, Costello explores the communal function of poetry—the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural.