Reading Vladimir Nabokov: 'Lolita' (Literature Insights)

An illuminating study of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel with special attention to its film versions.

From its first publication in 1955 Nabokov's Lolita has been denounced as immoral filth, hailed as a moral masterpiece, and both praised and damned for stylistic excess. In this fresh appraisal John Lennard provides convenient overviews of Nabokov's life and of the novel (including both Kubrick's and Lyne's film-adaptations), before considering Lolita as pornography, as lepidoptery, as film noir, and as parody.

John Lennard has taught for the Universities of London, Cambridge, the University of the West Indies–Mona, and Notre Dame du Lac, for the Open University, and for Fairleigh Dickinson University on-line. His publications include 'But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse' (Clarendon Press, 1991), 'The Poetry Handbook' (OUP, 1996; 2/e 2005), with Mary Luckhurst 'The Drama Handbook' (OUP, 2002), and two collections of essays on Genre Fiction, 'Of Modern Dragons' (2007) and 'Of Sex and Faerie'; (2010) both available in PDF from HEB, in Kindle format, and in paperback from Troubador. He is General Editor of HEB’s Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series, for which he has written on Reginald Hill, Walter Mosley, Octavia E. Butler, Ian McDonald, and Tamora Pierce. For Literature Insights he has also written on Hamlet, King Lear, and Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet & Staying On.