Read complete books and articles on: Lolita (by Vladimir Nabokov)

Nabokov, Vladimir - vlädēˈmĭr näbôˈkŏf, 1899–1977, Russian-American author, b. St. Petersburg, Russia. He emigrated to England after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and graduated from Cambridge in 1922. He moved to the United States in 1940. From 1948 to 1959 he was professor of Russian literature at Cornell Univ. He moved to

One of the great novelists of the 20th cent., Nabokov was an extraordinarily imaginative writer, often experimenting with the form of the novel. Although his works are frequently obscure and puzzling—filled with grotesque incidents, word games, and literary allusions—they are always erudite, witty, and intriguing. Before 1940, Nabokov wrote in Russian under the name V. Sirin. Among his early novels are Mary (1926, tr. 1970) and Invitation to a Beheading (1938, tr. 1959). His first book in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1938).

Nabokov's most widely known work is undoubtedly Lolita (1958). The story of a middle-aged European intellectual's infatuation with a 12-year-old American "nymphet," Lolita was considered scandalous when it was first published. Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) is a philosophical novel that is both the chronicle of a long incestuous love affair and a probe into the nature of time. Among Nabokov's other novels are Bend Sinister (1947), Pnin (1957), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974).

Nabokov's volumes of poetry include Poems and Problems (1970). Among collections of his short stories are Nine Stories (1947), Nabokov's Dozen (1958), and A Russian Beauty (1973); many of them are gathered in The Stories of Vladimir Nobokov (1995). Among his other works are a critical study of Gogol (1944); translations from the Russian, notably a four-volume version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964); and several autobiographical volumes, most notably Speak, Memory (1966). His college lectures, posthumously published, include Lectures on Literature: British, French, and German Writers (1980) and Lectures on Russian Literature (1981). He also achieved an international reputation as a lepidopterist.

See biography by B. Boyd (2 vol., 1990–91); studies by A. Field (1967), W. W. Rowe (1971), D. Fowler (1974), L. Toker (1989), and M. Wood (1995); B. Boyd and R. M. Pyle, ed., Nabokov's Butterflies (2000). See also biography of his wife by S. Schiff (1999).

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13 of the Best Books and Articles on: Lolita (by Vladimir Nabokov)

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1.

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (Literary Criticism) » Read Now
by Harold Bloom. 131 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
2.

Lolita's Loose Ends: Nabokov and the Boundless Novel, in Twentieth Century Literature » Read Now
by James Tweedie. 21 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...in a safer world" (6). And with Humberts crimes against Lolita already laid out before the reader, the concluding remarks...Triquarterly 17 (1970): 187-208. Nabokov...
3.

Lolita Revisited, in New England Review » Read Now
by Michael Wood. 29 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Nabokov himself, in an essay on Lolita which is now included in most editions...Nabokovs own remarks on the origins of Lolita : As far as I can recall, the initial...be...
4.

Classic Cult Fiction: A Companion to Popular Cult Literature (Discussion of Lolita begins on p. 130) » Read Now
by Thomas Reed Whissen. 324 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Classic Cult Fiction is a history, analysis, and reference guide to books that have become "bibles" to generations of Europeans and Americans over the past 200 years--books like The Catcher in the Rye. Fearlessly taking on "canon formation," Whissen identifies the top 50 classic cult books, first...
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Classic Cult Fiction is a history, analysis, and reference guide to books that have become "bibles" to generations of Europeans and Americans over the past 200 years--books like The Catcher in the Rye. Fearlessly taking on "canon formation," Whissen identifies the top 50 classic cult books, first presenting an informed and witty interpretation of the phenomenon and its characteristics with examples from different cultures and periods. The individual works are each discussed relative to time and place, impact, and audience psychology and analyzed in terms of common cult attributes. A chronological listing of cult fiction adds a number of titles not chosen for the top 50.
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5.

Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's Prose (Part III "Lolita") » Read Now
by David H. J. Larmour. 182 pgs.

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The prose writings of Vladimir Nabokov form one of the most intriguing oeuvres of the twentieth century. His novels, which include Despair, Lolita and Pale Fire , have been celebrated for their stylistic artistry, their formal complexity, and their unique treatment of themes of memory, exile...
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The prose writings of Vladimir Nabokov form one of the most intriguing oeuvres of the twentieth century. His novels, which include Despair, Lolita and Pale Fire , have been celebrated for their stylistic artistry, their formal complexity, and their unique treatment of themes of memory, exile, loss, and desire. This collection of essays offers readings of several novels as well as discussions of Nabokov's exchange of views about literature with Edmund Wilson, and his place in the 1960s and contemporary popular culture. The volume brings together a diverse group of Nabokovian readers, of widely divergent scholarly backgrounds, interests, and approaches. Together they shift the focus from the manipulative games of author and text to the restless and sometimes resistant reader, and suggest new ways of enjoying these endlessly fascinating texts.
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6.

Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy (Chap. 7 "Framing Lolita: Is There a Woman in the Text?") » Read Now
by Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, Patricia Yaeger. 322 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
7.

Nabokov's Genocidal and Nuclear Holocausts in 'Lolita,' in Mosaic (Winnipeg) » Read Now
by Douglas Anderson. 18 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, Literature, Entire Library

...inevitably appeal. Among his postwar novels, Lolita in particular represents Nabokovs most...Indeed, in his recent treatment of Lolita in particular, Vladimir...
8.

Acts of Naming: The Family Plot in Fiction (Chap. 8 "Lolita") » Read Now
by Michael Ragussis. 268 pgs.

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Michael Ragussis re-reads the novelistic tradition by arguing the acts of naming--bestowing, revealing, or earning a name; taking away, hiding, or prohibiting a name; slandering, or protecting and serving it--lie at the center of fictional plots from the 18th century to the present. Against the...
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Michael Ragussis re-reads the novelistic tradition by arguing the acts of naming--bestowing, revealing, or earning a name; taking away, hiding, or prohibiting a name; slandering, or protecting and serving it--lie at the center of fictional plots from the 18th century to the present. Against the background of philosophic approaches to naming, Acts of Naming reveals the ways in which systems of naming are used to appropriate characters in novels as diverse as Clarissa, Fanny Hill, Oliver Twist, Pierre, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Remembrance of Things Past, and Lolita, and identifies unnaming and renaming as the locus of power in the family's plot to control the child, and more particularly, to rape the daughter. His analysis also treats additional works by Cooper, Bronte, Hawthorne, Eliot, Twain, Conrad, and Faulkner, extending the concept of the naming plot to reimagine the traditions of the novel, comparing American and British plots, female and male plots, inheritance and seduction plots, and so on. Acts of Naming ends with a theoretical exploration of the "magical" power of naming in different eras and in different, even competing, forms of discourse.
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9.

Stages of the Clown: Perspectives on Modern Fiction from Dostoyevsky to Beckett (Chap. 6 "The World Upside Down II: William Burrough's Naked Lunch and Nabokov's Lolita") » Read Now
by Richard Pearce. 170 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...William Faulkner, John Hawkes, Vladimir Nabokov, Gunter Grass, and William Burroughs...which this author examines profitably. By now it must be clear that Mr...
10.

Literature and Domination: Sex, Knowledge, and Power in Modern Fiction (Chap. 3 "Adorno, Althusser, and Humbert Humbert: Nabokov's Lolita as Neo-Marxist Critique of Bourgeois Subjectivity") » Read Now
by M. Keith Booker. 188 pgs.

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Employing thc theoretical resources provided by cultural critics such as Adorno, Jameson, Althusser, and Foucault, M. Keith Booker examines the treatment of issues of power and domination in modern literature. Discussing texts such as Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Thomas...
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Employing thc theoretical resources provided by cultural critics such as Adorno, Jameson, Althusser, and Foucault, M. Keith Booker examines the treatment of issues of power and domination in modern literature. Discussing texts such as Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Thomas Pynchon's V., and Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, Booker focuses on gender relations as a locus of struggles for power in human relations generally. He also pays special attention to the work of Samuel Beckett, reading the novels Watt and The Lost Ones to explore the issues of power and domination in an Irish cultural context. For all of the texts read, such issues are explored in terms not only of content but of style and form. What is distinctive about many modern texts, Booker claims, is the reflexive way literary meditations on power, authority, and domination turn inward to involve examinations of textuality and reading as images of the kinds of struggles for mastery that inform society at large. Booker suggests that literary knowledge is of a different order than the traditional theoretical knowledge that is equated with power in the West. "Literature has the potential to explore and illuminate objects of inquiry in a mode of dialogue and performance rather than by seeking to dominate them in the traditional mode of science", he writes. "Especially in the difficult and complex texts of modern literature, successful reading requires that readers and texts work together, pointing toward ways the human drive for mastery can be fulfilled through cooperation rather than through demanding the submission of some Other who is being mastered or dominated".
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11.

Recovering Women: Feminisms and the Representation of Addiction ("Lolita, Sexual Agency, and the 'New' Feminist Aesthetic" begins on p. 40) » Read Now
by Melissa Pearl Friedling. 205 pgs.

Collections: Psychology, Entire Library

Melissa Pearl Friedling is assistant professor of film in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University.
12.

The Cinematic Art of Nympholepsy: Movie Star Culture as Loser Culture in Nabokov's Lolita, in Criticism » Read Now
by Elizabeth Power. 20 pgs.

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...Culture as Loser Culture in Nabokovs Lolita by ELIZABETH POWER THE...commenting on the filming of his novel Lolita (dir. Stanley Kubrick).(9) He continues...citations are...
13.

"April in Arizona": Nabokov as an American Writer, in American Literary History » Read Now
by Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. 11 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...years before the immense success of Lolita (his third English novel) allowed...loss, a teasing hotel entry left by Lolitas abductor: "the gruesome Harold Haze...Works Cited...