A Cultural History of Chess-Players : Minds, Machines, and Monsters.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (236 pages)
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.
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.