Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature

This volume offers insight into Vladimir Nabokov as a reader and a teacher, and sheds new light on the relationship of his views on literary aesthetics to the development of his own oeuvre. The essays included focus on the lectures on European and Russian literature that Nabokov gave at a number of American universities in the years between his arrival in the United States and the publication of Lolita. Nabokov’s treatment of literary masterpieces by Austen, Cervantes, Chekhov, Dickens, Flaubert, Gogol, Kafka, Joyce, Proust and Stevenson is assessed by experts on these authors.

Contributors are: Lara Delage-Toriel, Ben Dhooge, Yannicke Chupin, Roy Groen, Luc Herman, Flora Keersmaekers, Arthur Langeveld, Geert Lernout, Vivian Liska, Ilse Logie, Jürgen Pieters, Gerard de Vries.

Ben Dhooge is professor of Russian Literature at Ghent University. His research focuses on early 20th century Russian literature, both Soviet and émigré. He has published on Andrey Platonov, Russian literary Modernism and early 20th century Russian émigré culture.

Jürgen Pieters is professor of Literary Theory at Ghent University. He is the author of several books on the methodology of New Historicism and edited collections on the work of Roland Barthes, Catherine Belsey and Stephen Greenblatt.