A 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.