Academic and Publishing History
In 1979 Boyd completed a PhD at the University of Toronto with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, in the context of Nabokov’s epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics. That year he took up a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Auckland (on New Zealand novelist Maurice Gee) before being appointed a lecturer in English there in 1980. Véra Nabokov, Nabokov’s widow, in 1979 invited Boyd to catalog her husband’s archives, a task he completed in 1981. That year he also began researching a critical biography of Nabokov.
Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness (1985; rev. 2001) examined Ada in its own terms and in relation to Nabokov’s thought and style. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (1990) and Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (1991) won numerous awards and widespread acclaim and have been translated into seven languages.
In the 1990s Boyd edited Nabokov’s English-language fiction and memoirs for the Library of America (3 vols., 1996) and, with lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle, Nabokov's writings on butterflies (Nabokov's Butterflies, 2000). He also began a biography of philosopher Karl Popper, and work on literature and evolution.
Boyd’s 1999 book, Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, attracted attention both for the novelty of Boyd’s reading of Pale Fire and for his rejecting his own influential interpretation of the notoriously elusive novel in Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years.
In 2009 he published On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction. Often compared in scope with Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957), On the Origin of Stories proposes that art and storytelling are adaptations and derive from play. It also shows evolutionary literary criticism in practice in studies of Homer’s Odyssey and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who!.
As of 2011 Boyd continues to work on Nabokov, including ongoing annotations to Ada (1993- ), collected in a website (AdaOnline, 2004- ), an edition of Nabokov’s verse translations (Verses and Versions, 2008), and forthcoming editions of his letters to Véra, and his unpublished lectures on Russian literature, and also especially on Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Art Spiegelman, and Popper.
Boyd's latest book, Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition and Shakespeare's Sonnets, was released by HUP, in April, 2012.
Read more about this topic: Brian Boyd
Famous quotes containing the words academic and, academic, publishing and/or history:
“You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn’t kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Short of a wholesale reform of college athletics—a complete breakdown of the whole system that is now focused on money and power—the women’s programs are just as doomed as the men’s are to move further and further away from the academic mission of their colleges.... We have to decide if that’s the kind of success for women’s sports that we want.”
—Christine H. B. Grant, U.S. university athletic director. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A42 (May 12, 1993)
“While you continue to grow fatter and richer publishing your nauseating confectionery, I shall become a mole, digging here, rooting there, stirring up the whole rotten mess where life is hard, raw and ugly.”
—Norman Reilly Raine (1895–1971)
“As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)