Saturday, November 04, 2017

Pg. 99: John Sharples's "A Cultural History of Chess-Players"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: A Cultural History of Chess-Players: Minds, Machines, and Monsters by John Sharples.

About the book, from the publisher:
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.
John Sharples is an independent historian.

Learn more about A Cultural History of Chess-Players at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: A Cultural History of Chess-Players.

--Marshal Zeringue