Michael Rodgers, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (Eds.), Nabokov and the Question of Morality. Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction, Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016.
« A volume that Susan Elizabeth Sweeney co-edited with Michael Rodgers, Nabokov and the Question of Morality: Aesthetics, Metaphysics, and the Ethics of Fiction, has just come out from Palgrave Macmillan. It addresses the vexing issue of Nabokov’s moral stances, arguing that he designed his works as open-ended ethical problems–concerning good or bad reading, God’s existence, the nature of evil, agency and altruism, and the ethics of representing sex, punishment, and suffering, among other topics–for readers to confront. The volume includes essays by Gennady Barabtarlo, Julian Connolly, Leland de la Durantaye, Jacqueline Hamrit, Elspeth Jajdelska, Laurence Piercy, David Rampton, Michael Rodgers, Samuel Schuman, Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, Tom Whalen, and Michael Wood.
Dana Draguniou calls the book « A tremendous achievement . . . Fyodor, the protagonist of Nabokov’s Russian magnum opus The Gift, notes that reading Pushkin is like having the capacity of one’s lungs expanded; reading these essays offers a similarly bracing experience. » Thomas Karshan praises it for treating « Nabokov’s eerie and insistent moral simplicity as a question and a puzzle, extending his ethical intricacy well into » many new topics for critical exploration. »
