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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sharples, John, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chess players--Biography.

Chess players.

Chess--Social aspects.

Chess.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (225 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2017.

Summary:

A chess-player is not simply one who plays chess just as a chess piece is not simply a wooden block. Shaped by expectations and imaginations, the figure occupies the centre of a web of a thousand radiations where logic meets dream, and reason meets play. This book aspires to a novel reading of the figure as both a flickering beacon of reason and a sign of monstrosity. It 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. The history of the cultural chess-player is a spectacle, a collision of tradition and recycling, which rejects the idea of the statuesque chess-player. The book considers three lives of the chess-player. The first as sinner (concerning behavioural and locational contexts), as a melancholic (concerning mind-bending and affective contexts), and as animal (concerning cognitive aspects and the idea of human-ness) from the medieval to the early-modern within non-fiction. The book then considers the role of the chess-player in detective fiction from Edgar Allan Poe to Raymond Chandler, contrasting the perceived relative intellectual reputation and social utility of the chess-player and the literary detective. IBM's late-twentieth-century supercomputer Deep Blue, Wolfgang von Kempelen's 1769 Automaton Chess-Player and Garry Kasparov's 1997 defeat are then examined. The book examines portrayals of the chess-player within comic-books of the mid-twentieth century, considering themes of monstrous bodies, masculinities, and moralities. It focuses on the concepts of the child prodigy, superhero, and transhuman.

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:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 10 Jul 2026).

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

ISBN:

1-5261-2055-0

1-5261-2054-2

OCLC:

1132662323