Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0005518, Sun, 8 Oct 2000 11:44:13 -0700

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VN Bibliography: Pifer
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EDITOR's NOTE. Ellen Pifer <epifer@odin.english.udel.edu>, current
President of the International Vladimir Nbokov Society, has just published a
new book.
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Ellen Pifer, *Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary
Writing and Culture.* Charlottesville and London: University Press of
Virginia, 2000. The study includes a chapter on Nabokov entitled
"Nabokov's Novel Offspring: Lolita and Her Kin."

Advance praise for the book:

"This study of the representation of children in fiction from Henry James
to Don DeLillo vividly demonstrates how the novel both reflects the
underlying predicaments of our culture and provides critical insight into
them. Ellen Pifer writes with rare lucidity and grace, evincing an
enthusiasm for a wide variety of writers and a steady perceptiveness about
their work. This book provides welcome reassurance that criticism can
still be rooted in the love of reading and in the engagement with the
serious moral concerns of literature."
Robert Alter, University of California at Berkeley


"A richly informed, generously argued, and undogmatic study of how
twentieth-century writers (and the culture generally) have dealt with the
vexing tradition of 'the child.' The readings of the novels are
unfailing impressive, but Pifer's vision of the culture at large is
something more: a rare and valuable achievement."
James Kincaid, University of Southern California


"An exciting and original book: a major contribution to literary and
cultural studies. Pifer writes of literary children in terms that reveal
her wide-ranging research, her mastery of critical theory, her extensive
knowledge of world literature and its languages, and her humane commitment
to a scholarship rooted in things that matter to the larger cause of
civilization."
David Cowart, University of South Carolina