Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook

Book Overview

Midway through the last century, Lolita burst on the literary scene--a Russian exile's extraordinary gift to American letters and the New World. The scandal provoked by the novel's subject--the sexual passion of a middle-aged European for a twelve-year-old American girl--was quickly upstaged by the critical attention it received from readers, scholars, and critics around the world. This casebook gathers together an interview with Nabokov as well as nine critical essays about Lolita. The essays follow a progression focusing first on textual and thematic features and then proceeding to broader topics and cultural implications, including the novel's relations to other works of literature and art and the movies adapted from it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195150333
• ISBN13: 9780195150339
• Release Date: November 2002
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.8" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Wonderfully illuminating commentaries on Lolita.

This casebook looks at Nabokov's controversial novel from different angles based on diverse critical schools. It comments on the narrator,on the Americanisation of Humbert Humbert, on the rhetorical tools used to capture the reader and illuminates the way readers have reacted to this wonderful novel. It also takes into account the films on Lolita and discusses them in relation to the book. All in all it is an important aid in deciphering the rhetorics of Nabokov's fiction and glimpsing what it is that makes him such an important author.