Lectures on Literature
About this ebook
In the 1940s, when Vladimir Nabokov first embarked on his academic career in the United States, he brought with him hundreds of original lectures on the authors he most admired. For two decades those lectures served as the basis for Nabokov’s teaching, first at Wellesley and then at Cornell, as he introduced undergraduates to the delights of great fiction.
This volume collects Nabokov’s famous lectures on Western European literature, with analysis and commentary on Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Gustav Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, Marcel Proust’s The Walk by Swann’s Place, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and other works. This volume also includes photographic reproductions of Nabokov’s original notes, revealing his own edits, underlined passages, and more.
Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers
Introduction by John Updike
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About the author
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Russian-born poet, novelist, literary critic, translator, and essayist was awarded the National Medal for Literature for his life's work in 1973. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. He is the author of many works including Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and Speak, Memory.
John Updike is the author of numerous books, including the acclaimed "Rabbit" novels, Couples, In the Beauty of the Lilies, and Bech at Bay. He has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1998 he received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
