"Games Authors Play" by Peter Hutchinson (Methuen, 1983)

About how authors set various puzzles for readers.

• "The first collections of literary games would seem to have been those of Isaac D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature (1791-1817) and Ludovic Lalanne, Curiosirés littéraires (1845)"
• "Ms [Susan] Stewart considers five principal methods by which the transformation [from common sense to nonsense] takes place. These include 'reversals and inversions' (of which the most striking are palindrome, discourse that denies its own credibility, and metaphors which are made literal); 'play with boundaries' (in particular ... provision of too much - or too little - information); 'play with infinity' (especially repetition and quotation, 'nesting' ...); 'simultaneity' (most obviously, works which contain simultaneous events, puns ...)" (p.10)
• "the detective story proper only begins with Edgar Allan Poe and his Chevalier Dupin" (p.24)
• "The nature of allegory has changed over the centuries, developing from its medieval and Renaissance mode (in which correspondences between certain abstraction or generalisations and the figures of the new plot were straightforward and rather naive) to a more 'subversive' kind after the end of the seventeenth century. It then became a more satirical form, in which a political aim was often apparent" (p.54)
• "Social games would seem to have preceded sporting ones as a popular form of parallel in literature, but the emphasis now seems to fall rather on sport" (p.68)
• Updike's "The Centaur" ends with a "Mythological Index", "a long list of mythological figures who may be seen to feature in the novel, together with the page number(s) on which they supposedly appear" (p.75)
• "Historical periods of intense intellectual activity and self-discovery seem to have provided the best moments for paradox to flourish. As a self-conscious, overtly intellectual, often ingenuous exercise of the mental faculties, it requires a responsive audience as much as a brilliant exponent" (p.87)
• "The Elizabethans readily employed puns in such serious contexts; our own age prefers them as jokes" (p.104)