Brian Boyd
I have published on American, Brazilian, English, Greek, Irish, New Zealand, and Russian literature and on literary modes from epics to comics. I have seven main areas of concentration: novelist Vladimir Nabokov; William Shakespeare; Art Spiegelman (and comics and graphic novels in general); literature (and art in general), evolution and cognition; narrative; literature (arts, humanities) and science; and philosopher of science Karl Popper.
I have written a two-volume biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991), monographs on Ada (1985; rev. ed. 2001) and on Pale Fire (1999), and have edited Nabokov’s fiction and memoirs (Library of America, 3 vols., 1996), Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (1999), Speak, Memory (1999), Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry (2008), Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos by John Shade (2011), and Stalking Nabokov: Selected Essays (2011). Forthcoming Nabokov books include Letters to Véra (2014), Nabokov Upside-Down (2014) and Think, Write, Speak (2015).
In literature and evolution, I have written On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2009), and co-edited, with Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall, Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader (2010). A companion piece to On the Origin of Stories, Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare's Sonnets, was published in 2012. I intend to write a sequel, tentatively On the Ends of Stories: Literature, Evolution, and Cognition, also for Harvard, which will focus on Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, Spiegelman and film, but it will have to wait until the Popper biography is done.
In Shakespeare studies, I have edited Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson (2004), written Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare's Sonnets (2012) and essays on Titus Andronicus, King John, Hamlet and the Sonnets.
On Spiegelman, I have written essays on Maus, The Narrative Corpse, In the Shadow of No Towers, and MetaMaus.
After setting Karl Popper: A Life aside for a number of years to work on literature and evolution, I have returned to it to work on it full-time from 2012 to 2014, on a Marsden Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand.
I have written a two-volume biography, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991), monographs on Ada (1985; rev. ed. 2001) and on Pale Fire (1999), and have edited Nabokov’s fiction and memoirs (Library of America, 3 vols., 1996), Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings (1999), Speak, Memory (1999), Verses and Versions: Three Centuries of Russian Poetry (2008), Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos by John Shade (2011), and Stalking Nabokov: Selected Essays (2011). Forthcoming Nabokov books include Letters to Véra (2014), Nabokov Upside-Down (2014) and Think, Write, Speak (2015).
In literature and evolution, I have written On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2009), and co-edited, with Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall, Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader (2010). A companion piece to On the Origin of Stories, Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare's Sonnets, was published in 2012. I intend to write a sequel, tentatively On the Ends of Stories: Literature, Evolution, and Cognition, also for Harvard, which will focus on Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce, Spiegelman and film, but it will have to wait until the Popper biography is done.
In Shakespeare studies, I have edited Words That Count: Essays on Early Modern Authorship in Honor of MacDonald P. Jackson (2004), written Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare's Sonnets (2012) and essays on Titus Andronicus, King John, Hamlet and the Sonnets.
On Spiegelman, I have written essays on Maus, The Narrative Corpse, In the Shadow of No Towers, and MetaMaus.
After setting Karl Popper: A Life aside for a number of years to work on literature and evolution, I have returned to it to work on it full-time from 2012 to 2014, on a Marsden Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand.
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Papers by Brian Boyd
Eric Naiman, TLS: “an impressive achievement. Copiously annotated and amply indexed, it is extremely user-friendly. . . . the richly textured, eminently readable translations by Boyd and Olga Voronina are admirably faithful. An enormous amount of research has gone into the annotation, and a generation of scholars of the emigration will be in Boyd and Voronina’s debt.”
Donald Rayfield, The Literary Review: “exemplary translation and annotation make this collection something of a biography in itself.” Philip Hensher, Spectator: “some of the most rapturous love letters anyone has ever written, love letters from the length of a lifelong marriage; beautiful performances for Véra, Nabokov’s wife, and incidentally for us.”
26 essays over 20 years (most over the last six) on Nabokov as man, writer, thinker, stylist, storyteller, psychologist and scientist, on his connections with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy and Machado de Assis, and on his autobiography, Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and The Original of Laura.
Available and at a 45% reduction on Amazon at
http://www.amazon.com/Pale-Fire-Poem-Cantos-Shade/dp/1584234318/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_4
More information on the publisher's website
http://www.gingkopress.com/09-lit/vladimir-nabokov-pale-fire.html
Now in paperback at $11.78 on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Stories-Evolution-Cognition-Fiction/dp/0674057112/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
From reviews:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?recid=30825&content=reviews"
“goes beyond what one might hope for. . . . a galvanizing set of blueprints. . . the state-of-the-art in a nascent field” (Evolution and Human Behavior, 2011)
"
"far and away Nabokov’s best informed and most subtle critic. . . . a radical new interpretation of Pale Fire . . . a breakthrough study" (D. Barton Johnson, Nabokov Studies)
"an instant classic" (Nabokov Studies); "magnificent" (Washington Post)
See more, and order, at http://www.cybereditions.com/CYVIEWSUMMARY::10014
With an introduction by Brian Boyd.
For an excerpt from the introduction, go to:
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/nabokov/speak.html
Co-edited and with introductions, explanatory notes, and lists of butterflies Nabokov named, and those named after him, by Brian Boyd and nature-writer and lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle.
see https://evolution-institute.org/article/the-riddle-and-the-range-of-art/
Series Editor: Brian Boyd (University of Auckland)
Editorial Board:
Steven Brown (McMaster University)
Jill Cook (The British Museum)
Richard Gerrig (Stony Brook University)
Sarah Hrdy (University of California, Davis)
Marcus Nordlund (University of Gothenburg)
Alex C. Parrish (James Madison University)
David Sloan Wilson (Binghamton University)
We invite book proposals on any aspect of evolution, cognition, and the arts:
- theory, criticism, empirical research, or any combination of the three;
- the arts in general, or a particular art, such as architecture, comics, dance, drama, film, literature, music, television, or any of the visual arts, from handaxes and basketry to installations, or any combination of different arts;
- in a particular genre or period, or particular artist(s) / composer(s) / performer(s) / writer(s), or audiences or readers, or across periods and genres or from creators and performers to audiences;
- at particular life stages, from childhood to maturity, or across the life span;
- or from particular angles, such as the anthropological, philosophical, or psychological.
Proposals may be informed by evolutionary and/or cognitive research in aesthetics, anthropology, archaeology, biology, economics, neuroscience, and/or psychology, as well as, of course, by a sensitive understanding of the art(s) and examples under investigation. Empirical work may include experiments with or analysis of audience response, research in the digital humanities, or other fruitful methods. The advisory board includes leaders in evolutionary and cognitive work on literature, film, music and the visual arts, and in evolutionary and cognitive aesthetics, anthropology, archaeology, biology, economics, neuroscience, and psychology.
In this series, we assume that culture matters, but also that biology does; that human universals matter, but that local variables and individual differences do too. We hope for work that is academically rigorous but also seeks to engage with the large audience interested in the arts and in why and how the arts matter to us