The Humour of Vladimir Nabokov: Mind and Matter

By Paul Benedict Grant

Many critics classify Vladimir Nabokov as a highbrow humourist, a refined wordsmith overly fond of playful puzzles and private in-jokes whose art appeals primarily to an intellectually-sophisticated readership. This study presents a more balanced portrait, placing equal emphasis on the broader, earthier humour that is such a marked feature of Nabokov's writing, which draws on the human body and all things physical for its laughs: sex and scatology, farce and slapstick. Moving between the metaphysical and the physical, the cosmic and the comic, mind and matter, it presents Nabokov as a writer at home in both high and low forms of humour, a comedian who is capable of producing as many belly laughs as brainteasers, and of appealing to a much wider readership than is commonly supposed.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1399519212
• ISBN13: 9781399519212
• Release Date: September 2024
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"