Dr Barbara Wyllie

Managing Editor of Slavonic and East European Review (SEER)

Barbara Wyllie read English at Cambridge and then took a Master’s in Russian Literature at SSEES, where she went on to study for a PhD on Nabokov. She began working on the Slavonic and East European Review in October 2000 while continuing to write on Nabokov. Her first monograph, Nabokov at the Movies: Film Perspectives in Fiction, was published in 2003, and she has also contributed to Liza Zunshine’s Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries, Stephen Kellman and Irving Malin’s Torpid Smoke: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov and Yuri Leving’s Shades of Laura: Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Novel, ‘The Original of Laura’, as well as The Reference Guide to Russian Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov and the Wiley/Blackwell Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction. Her most recent book is an illustrated literary biography for Reaktion’s Critical Lives series. In February 2015 she was invited to become an Associate Editor of the Nabokov Online Journal (NOJ), and in July 2017 co-organized and presented at a British Library conference, ‘Russia in American Literature’. Her wider research interests are in Russian and American literature, cinema and music.

Qualifications

PhD, “A Study of the Work of Vladimir Nabokov in the Context of Contemporary American Fiction and Film”, UCL, 2000

MA Russian Studies (Literature), University of London, 1995

BA (English Literature), University of Cambridge, 1989

Publications

Books:

Vladimir Nabokov (London: Reaktion, 2010)

Nabokov at the Movies: Film Perspectives in Fiction (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003)

Articles and Chapters:

‘Nabokov’s Cinematic Sensibility and Film Strategy in The Defense’, Slavonic and East European Review, 101, 4, 2023, pp. 626-69, DOI: 10.1353/see.2023.a923982
‘Childhood’, in Siggy Frank and David Bethea (eds), Nabokov in Context (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 28-34.
‘From Imperial Pineapples to Stalinist Sausage: The Politics and Poetics of Food in Russian Literature’, in Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Donna Lee Brian (eds), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 351-63.
‘Shape-Shifters, Charlatans, and Frauds: Vladimir Nabokov’s Confidence Men’, Cambridge Quarterly, 2016, 45 (1), pp. 1-19.
‘My Age of Innocence Girl”: Humbert, Chaplin, Lita and Lo’, Nabokov Online Journal, IX, 2015.
‘Looking for Flora: Deviance and Disclosure in Nabokov’s The Original of Laura’, in Yuri Leving (ed.), Shades of Laura: Vladimir Nabokov’s Last Novel, ‘The Original of Laura’ (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).
‘Vladimir Nabokov’, in D. Seed (ed.), A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction (Chichester: Wiley/Blackwell, 2009).
‘Nabokov and Cinema’, in J. Connolly (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

‘The Original of Laura’; ‘Look at the Harlequins!’; ‘Transparent Things’; ‘Invitation to a Beheading’; ‘King, Queen, Knave’; ‘The Return of Chorb’, in The Literary Encyclopedia (www.litencyc.com, 2005–2010).

‘Experiments in Perspective: Cinematics in Nabokov’s Russian Fiction’, New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 36, 2002.

‘Popular Music in Nabokov’s Lolita, or Frankie and Johnny: A New Key to Lolita?’, in Revue des études slaves, 70, 2000, 3–4: ‘Vladimir Nabokov dans le miroir du XXe siècle’.

‘Memory and Dream in Nabokov’s Short Fiction’, in S. G. Kellman and I. Malin (eds), Torpid Smoke: The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Atlanta, GA and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000).

‘Resonances of Popular Music in Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada’, in L. Zunshine (ed.), Nabokov at the Limits: Redrawing Critical Boundaries (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999).

‘The Return of Chorb’, ‘Mary’, ‘Invitation to a Beheading’, in N. Cornwell (ed.), Reference Guide to Russian Literature (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998).