The first comprehensive collection of Nabokov's short fiction, containing sixty-five stories, was published eighteen years after his death. Nabokov had written the first fifty-five in Russian and later, together with his son Dmitri, translated them into English; he wrote the remaining ten in English after emigrating to America in 1940. Dmitri Nabokov compiled the 1995 volume from the four definitive English collections of thirteen stories each that appeared during his father's lifetime, Nabokov's Dozen, A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories, and Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, adding thirteen more, eleven of which had never before been translated into English. The unexpected discovery of an early story, “Easter Rain,” raised the total number of stories in the 1997 Vintage edition to sixty-six.

Nabokov wrote his first story, “The Wood-Sprite,” in 1921, when he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, and his last, “Lance,” in 1951, when he was teaching literature at Cornell. During that period Nabokov was an émigré writer in Berlin and Paris, a lepidopterist at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and a professor of literature, first at Wellesley and later at Cornell. He composed nine novels in Russian; the first novel he wrote in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and his greatest American novels were written after he abandoned the short story. Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962), and the Russian version of his memoir, Drugie berega (1954), that became Speak, Memory (1966) in its final English incarnation, appeared in the following decade.

The New Novel in Latin America did not fade away with the end of the Boom, and there has been a rich and varied pattern of literary production in the region by both experienced and newer writers from the later 1960s up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. However, a perceived critical clarity about the nature of the Boom has not yet been matched by a similar sense of clarity about what came after it. Though there have indeed been many lively debates about the nature of the New Narrative and the Boom in Latin American fiction, there is now something approaching a broad consensus as to their chronology and characteristics. Such a consensus is more elusive when it comes to the rather more slippery category of the so-called Post-Boom, a term that has come to be used to refer to developments from the late 1960s and early 1970s onwards. Indeed, as late as 1990, a leading critic of the work of Argentina’s Manuel Puig (linked by many with the emergence of a Post-Boom) was complaining of the way in which “critics were quick to produce a new category…variously - and infelicitously - designated the 'petit-Boom', the 'Junior Boom', or even the 'post-Boom'.” However, the very currency of such terms does seem to indicate that some perceptible change of sorts was underway from around 1970, even if it was difficult to define clearly what that change really constituted. There are, for example, definite changes in material circumstances around this time which alert us to the possibility of a shift in emphasis. A number of major novelists associated with the Boom noticeably develop in a somewhat different direction during and after the seventies. And a cohort of new writers with a conspicuously different voice or agenda begin to publish around the turn of these key decades.

The study of social class remains deeply connected to a classical tradition featuring the scholarship of Marx (e.g. [1894] 1964) and Weber (e.g. [1922] 1968). Indeed, when a new class scheme is proposed or an existing one elaborated, a common rhetorical strategy among its proponents is to justify that revision as some truer expression of classical ideas about the structure of inequality. This fascination with the classical tradition is of course realized in a highly selective way, with the scholarship of Marx and Weber typically featured; that of Sorokin, Parsons, and Warner treated as secondary; and that of Durkheim dismissed or ignored. The purpose of our chapter is to show that important insights about contemporary class structure can be gleaned from a fresh rereading of Durkheim's account of occupational associations (see Parkin 1992: 1; Pearce 1989: 1; Müller 1993: 106; cf. Lee 1995; Fenton 1980; Lehmann 1995). We hope to convince even the most jaded skeptics of exegesis that Durkheim is well worth revisiting, that his account is more prescient than typically has been appreciated, and that it can accordingly provide the foundation for a new class analysis that is tailor-made for contemporary research purposes.

The work of Durkheim has not figured prominently in any of the four waves of class analysis that can be identified over the last half-century. The first wave, which emerged in the immediate postwar period, drew on Weber and Sorokin for the purpose of discrediting Marxian class models and advancing gradational interpretations of inequality (e.g. prestige scales). In some variants of this tradition, the rise of a consensual occupational hierarchy was interpreted in functionalist terms (e.g. Parsons 1954), but such functionalist gloss didn't draw on the work of Durkheim save in the most general of ways.

Since the early 1980s there has been a remarkable growth in sociological studies of the body and in interdisciplinary work which has sought to resensitize social thought to the corporeal foundations of social action (Shilling 2005). Two broad theoretical perspectives have tended to dominate these analyses. On the one hand, certain writers have identified the governmental management of the body as setting key parameters to the overarching external environment in which social action occurs. Bryan Turner ([1984] 1996), for example, draws on Thomas Hobbes' and Talcott Parsons' concerns with the “problem of order” in order to identify the reproduction and regulation of populations through time and space, the restraint of desire, and the representation of bodies, as four key issues that face all societies. On the other hand, analysts have identified the body as central to the internal environment of social action. Arthur Frank (1991: 43), for example, examines the opportunities and constraints of action as given by the “problems of bodies themselves.” Such action-oriented studies typically develop by being attentive to “the body's own experience of its embodiment” and by drawing on interactionist, phenomenological, and existentialist resources provided by such figures as Georg Simmel and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Csordas 1994; Frank 1991: 48; Leder 1990).

Clarice Lispector’s fifth novel, A paixão segundo G.H. (The Passion According to G.H.) came out in Rio de Janeiro in 1964. It was the first book-length narrative she published following her definitive return to Brazil after sixteen years of accompanying her husband on diplomatic postings around the world. During her time abroad, she had continued to write and publish in Brazil, contributing short stories and articles to magazines and newspapers. This served to increase her popularity back home and bring her work to a wider circle of readers than her books alone had managed. In fact, a collection of short stories entitled A Legião Estrangeira (The Foreign Legion) was published the same year as A paixão segundo G.H. and threatened to overshadow the reception of the novel. But this was a short-lived phenomenon: The Passion According to G.H. has since proved to be one of Lispector’s best-loved, bestselling, and best-studied works. This disturbing tale of a woman who kills a cockroach differed from her previous books in the dense, intense voice of its first-person narrator and its episodic and fragmented nature. From the outset, it was well received by the critics, especially in Brazil, with several book-length studies and doctoral theses devoted to it.

The Passion is also one of the most translated of Lispector’s works: into Spanish (Uruguay, 1970), French (1978), Italian (1982), Japanese and German (1984), Spanish (1979), English (1988), Danish and Norwegian (1989). It is seen by many as her magnum opus; the fact that it was chosen to be part of the UNESCO-sponsored Archivos series of critical editions of key Spanish American and lusophone works (published in 1988 with a second edition in 1996) attests to this.

The history of Lolita, Nabokov's third novel in English, is nearly as bizarre as the story related in its pages. The narrator, Humbert Humbert, is a middle-aged European whose benighted passion for a twelve-year-old American girl drives him to make her his mistress. Years before the manuscript was rejected by a series of American publishers, Lolita's author nearly destroyed it himself. On a summer's day in 1950, riddled with doubts about the novel, Nabokov was on his way to the garden incinerator to burn its initial chapters when his wife, Véra, persuaded him to reconsider. As the novelist explained six years later, in his afterword to Lolita's belated American edition, “I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life” (Lo, 312 [ “On a Book Entitled Lolita”]). Nabokov gradually resumed work on the novel, which he completed in the spring of 1954. After five different American publishers found the subject too hot to handle, Lolita was brought out in Paris by the Olympia Press, best known for the frank sexual content of its publications. Rescued from oblivion by the prominent British novelist, Graham Greene, who praised Lolita's artistic merits in the pages of the London Sunday Times, the novel quickly became the focus of a legal and literary controversy. Despite its championship by American writers and critics, Lolita was not published in the USA until 1958; it quickly became an international bestseller.

According to an old saw, the problem of understanding a classic text is above all one of knowing how to ask the right questions. This small piece of wisdom is enormously attractive to the scholar approaching Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912) (hereafter Les Formes élémentaires) - a work that advances two outrageously ambitious theories and at least a dozen subsidiary hypotheses, and whose interpretive possibilities sometimes seem endlessly bewildering. The caution here, of course, is that what is or is not a good question must ultimately be settled, not by the text itself, but by the interests and purposes of the scholarly community. Good questions, in other words, will be those that lead to answers - or perhaps to other and better questions - that are interesting and useful to us. This caveat entered, I begin by asking what seems to be a good question - i.e. What did Durkheim himself consider the most important and distinctive aspects of his classic work? My assumption here is that the effort to answer this question will lead to other questions - some better, some worse - and of course to other answers as well.

On February 4, 1913 - as if anticipating my initial question - Durkheim spoke at a meeting of the Société francaise de philosophie, defending the “two principal ideas” that “dominate” Les Formes élémentaires. The first was what he called the “dynamogenic quality of religion” - i.e. its power to provide, not a speculative source of knowledge, but a real source of action.

Vladimir Nabokov was acutely aware of the image that readers and critics held of him. Deriding the notion that he was a “frivolous firebird,” he predicted that the day would come when someone would declare him to be a “rigid moralist kicking sin” and “assigning power to tenderness, talent, and pride” (SO, 193). Not only did Nabokov's prediction come true, but critics continue to discover new facets of the writer's legacy to highlight and explore. As a result, it has become clear that the man and his work evince enormous complexity. The facile labels applied to Nabokov early in his career - the “cool aesthete,” “impassive gamester” - have been replaced by other labels (if not “rigid moralist,” then “highly ethical” writer, metaphysician, philosopher). Yet all of these labels are proving to be simply one-dimensional; the full depth of Nabokov's talent has yet to be plumbed. Indeed, in recent years, new aspects of Nabokov's formidable intellectual legacy, such as his research as a lepidopterist, have begun to receive serious notice.

The present collection does not attempt to be encyclopedic in scope or coverage. Nabokov and his artistic legacy have too many dimensions to receive comprehensive treatment in a volume such as this. Instead, a group of distinguished Nabokov scholars has been asked to provide the interested reader with some new critical pathways into Nabokov’s rich creative landscape. Readers with some familiarity with Nabokov’s work will encounter thought-provoking treatments of Nabokov’s art and its place in a variety of cultural contexts.

More than any other twentieth-century writer whose travel agents inadvertently included Lenin and Hitler, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was concerned with discerning thematic designs in his life and encoding across his works “the fantastic recurrence of certain situations” (Pnin, 159 [ch. 6]). Once Lolita made him a celebrity, he used his public prose to direct his readers toward those prescient designs and to suggest that historical exigency was merely a tool for the materialization of his fantasy. His interviews, prefaces, postscripts, letters to various editors, and responses to his critics always strike me as pre-emptive and corrective, at once recapitulative and predictive. They chide, they nudge, they set the story straight, and they do so not by informing but by evoking.

In the quarter century since his death, much has been made of Nabokov as a thinker, as a metaphysician and moralist. We have learned a great deal, but D. Barton Johnson has recently challenged readers of Nabokov by asking, wouldn't we still be fascinated by his work even without his ideas? Although Nabokov would write differently in all sorts of ways if his metaphysics and ethics were thinner and poorer, Johnson surely is right, we would still read Nabokov without them.

Why would we? The obvious first answer is style. Nabokov is widely and justly regarded as a high-water mark of literary style. But although we admire the style of Speak, Memory, or Nabokov’s forewords and afterwords, or even Strong Opinions, we would not be drawn back to Nabokov again and again if there were just style and no story in his work. The dazzling detail, the inventive imagery, the patterned prose, the sinuous sentences, the thrill of the thought are all very well – very, very well – but even they are not enough.

The South American subcontinent is a region of marked differences and contrasts not only in its history and geography, but also as the result of the interaction of its many cultures, races, ethnicities, languages, religions, customs, and traditions throughout the ages. A topographically fragmented space, the area and its inhabitants are defined and conditioned by major physical environments and systems that encompass impenetrable jungles in the Amazon basin extending over large areas of Peru and Brazil, to some of the most arid regions in the world, such as the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. The dominant and most notable geographical feature of this land is, however, the Andes, a mountain range that boasts some of the highest peaks in the world, running along a general North-South direction parallel to the Pacific Ocean, and occupying significant portions of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, to the southernmost tip of Chile and Argentina.

In this essay we will examine the development of the novel in Andean countries and the crucial effect that their native Indian populations, history, and cultures have had on the genre. It must be noted, however, that this approach can be best be applied to countries whose populations consist of a majority of Indians, as is the case of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Though the natural habitat of the Andean Indians has for centuries centered around agrarian communities, starting in the 1950s, major segments of those populations have gravitated towards urban centers for economic, political, and social reasons. This demographic phenomenon had a powerful effect on the novel.

Vladimir Nabokov repeatedly went on record rejecting sociopolitical engagement as a writer's duty. His non-engagé stance earned him the suspicion of the readers who expect novelists to critique the social order, negotiate its change, or teach the audience how to live. It also earned him the hostility of those who believe that emphasis on aesthetics rather than an emphatic promotion of values conducive to “bringing up a better generation in a safer world” (Lo, 8) may be a sufficient reason for, as it were, turning pedophilia into a thing of beauty.

Yet even if Nabokov’s concern with aesthetics dominates his ideology (“what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art” [SO, 33]), it is not exclusive. Its link with his ethical concepts and metaphysical preferences emerges from, for instance, the connotations of definition of “aesthetic bliss,” in the Afterword to Lolita, as “a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity,enderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” (Lo, 314–15): the expression “other states of being” refers not only to states of heightened aesthetic perception but also to states of quickened ethical awareness and to states of metaphysically refined consciousness. Here I shall discuss Nabokov’s worldview in terms of this interconnectedness of his poetics, ethics, and metaphysical outreach, also taking into consideration some of the political aspects of his stance.

The Central American novel can be traced back to José Milla (1822-82), one of Guatemala’s most revered and popular writers to this day. His novels La hija del Adelantado (“Governor’s daughter,” 1866), Los Nazarenos (“The Nazarenes,” 1867), and El Visitador (“The Inspector,” 1867) are historical romances set in the colonial era. In novels whose plots involve political intrigue, the travails of love and some fantastic elements, Milla endeavors to portray authentic Guatemalan speech, manners, and popular types. One of his notable achievements is the creation of a stock character named Juan Chapín (Juan the Guatemalan), the fictional hero of Un viaje al otro mundo (1874), a book of semi-fictional memoirs and quixotic adventures. In contrast to the engaging Juan Chapín, the figure of a vain, scatterbrained compatriot, the laughing stock of Paris, is the creation of Hermógenes Alvarado (1845-1929) in Las aventuras del gran Morajuáy los apuros de un francés (1896), considered the first novel written in El Salvador.

The Central American novel paralleled developments in the rest of Latin America, although it usually lagged behind in the latest styles and techniques. In the last thirty years of the nineteenth century historical and sentimental novels were the favorite modes. Nicaragua’s first novel, Amor y Constancia (“Love and perseverance,” 1878) by José Dolores Gámez, would today be labeled a pulp-romance, while Panama’s first novel, La verdad triunfante (“The triumphant truth,” 1879) by Gil Colunje (1831-99), is also a sentimental tale. In Costa Rica the novelistic tradition began a few years later with Manuel Argöuello, who experimented with short historical novels in Margarita, Elisa Delimar, and La trinchera (“The trench,” 1900). In Guatemala, Agustín Mencos Franco published Don Juan Núñez García (1898), a historical novel inspired by Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas which recounts the rebellion by the Tzenal Indians in Chiapas at the beginning of the eighteenth century.