On Dolls

Some of the greatest thinkers and writers of our age, such as Baudelaire, Rilke, Kleist, Freud and Kafka, meditate on play and the mysteries of inanimate life. The essays and reflections in this collection, chosen and edited by Kenneth Goss, explore the seriousness of play and the mysteries of inanimate life – ‘the unknown spaces, noises, dust, lost objects, and small animals that fill any house’ – which have provoked many writers to take the side of these dead or non-human things, resulting in some of the most profound passages in literature. Kenneth Gross is Professor of English at the University of Rochester, and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University, a visiting fellow at the Bellagio Study Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, also the recipient of awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.