A cultural history of chess-players Minds, machines, and monsters / John Sharples.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sharples, John, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chess--Social aspects.

Chess.

Chess players--Biography.

Chess players.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (225 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester, [Michigan] : Manchester University Press, 2017.

Summary:

This inquiry concerns the cultural history of the chess-player. It takes as its premise the idea that the chess-player has become a fragmented collection of images, underpinned by challenges to, and confirmations of, chess's status as an intellectually-superior and socially-useful game, particularly since the medieval period. Yet, the chess-player is an understudied figure. No previous work has shone a light on the chess-player itself. Increasingly, chess-histories have retreated into tidy consensus. This work aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity. To this end, this book, utilising a wide range of sources, including newspapers, periodicals, detective novels, science-fiction, and comic-books, is underpinned by the idea that the chess-player is a pluralistic subject used to articulate a number of anxieties pertaining to themes of mind, machine, and monster.

Contents:

Cover

A cultural history of chess-players

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: 'Of magic look and meaning': themes concerning the cultural chess-player

Part I: Minds

1 Sinner, melancholic, and animal: three lives of the chess-player in medieval and early-modern literature

2 'A quiet game of chess?' Respectability in urban and literary space

3 Elementary: the chess-player and the literary detective

Part II: Machines

4 Future shocks: IBM's Deep Blue and the Automaton Chess-Player, 1997-1769

5 A haunted mind: Kasparov and the machines

6 'Everything was black': locating monstrosity in representations of the Automaton Chess-Player

Part III: Monsters

7 Red, black, white, and blue: American monsters

8 Performance notes: absence and presence in Reykjavik, Iceland, 1972

9 Kapow! The chess-player in comic-books, 1940-53

Epilogue: exploding heads and the death of the chess-player

Select bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-218) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-5261-2055-0

1-5261-2054-2

OCLC:

1132662323