Nabokov's Ada: The place of consciousness

Nabokov's The Place of Consciousness explores the relationship between the obvious dazzle of Nabokov's style and the unsuspected depths of his thought before focusing on his richest and most surprising novel. Boyd argues that not only are Nabokov's style and strategies richer than readers have suspected, but they also express an original philosophy of consciousness - a lucid and coherent aesthetics, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics. Widely acclaimed as the definitive guide to a great twentieth-century literary classic, this study reveals the myriad ways Nabokov found both to extol the amplitude and freedom of consciousness and at the same time to deplore our appalling entrapment in the self and the moment. Nabokov sought always to transcend the limits of the mind, looking for intimations of some freer consciousness beyond the mortal and material world. Boyd shows how these attitudes shape every level of his fiction, from the patterning of phrases to the interplay between reader and author. In a new preface for Cybereditions, Brian Boyd places Ada in the context of Nabokov's work, subsequent critical discussion, and his own later work. For this edition he has added four new chapters, written in the late 1980s and the 1990s, offering overviews of Ada from a variety of new vantage points. An Index of Passages in Ada allows readers to check for discussions of particular chapters of the novel, while a detailed General Index serves those interested in Ada in particular or in tracing Nabokov's style or thought in general. With the appearance of this augmented edition of Nabokov's The Place of Consciousness, Brian Boyd has greatly enhanced and updated the essential guide both to the thought of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers and to one of his most complex and rewarding works.