Cultural History of Chess-Players

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.

From the outset, the reader is drawn into a highly readable and theoretically engaging study of 'long-term' single women. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, the author provides a detailed examination of a triple discrimination, in terms of age, gender and single status. Focussing upon but not confined to modern Israel, the study takes us through the numerous sites and temporal contexts where these discriminations occur. However, this is not just a study of a particular gendered status but it is also a major contribution to the understanding of everyday time; waiting time, time passing, commodified time. In her final chapter the author opens up possibilities of alternative definitions and practices of singlehood. Prof. David Morgan, University of Manchester -- .

John Sharples is an independent historian