In Lectures on Foreign Literature, first published in 1980, Vladimir Nabokov, the greatest Russian-American writer of the 20th century, revealed to his admirers, who knew him primarily as a virtuoso writer, other, sometimes unexpected, facets: a thoughtful reader, an insightful, meticulous, yet highly passionate researcher, and a temperamental and demanding teacher. The book is based on a lecture course, 'Masters of European Prose,' prepared for students at Cornell University, where the writer taught in the 1940s and 1950s. In this volume, Nabokov the lecturer offers his audience a superb lesson in 'close reading' of the works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce.