Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Abstract

This essay analyzes Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (1955) which since its publication has been the object of controversial debates due to its topic of sexual child abuse. The essay questions the disturbing and common misreadings of the text along the lines of the faulty cultural archetype of the sexually responsive child. The interpretation follows a different approach in that it reads the novel as combining, in its aesthetic strategies, romantic, modernist and postmodernist concerns. Through its narrator, a mad but brilliant poet who transcends visible reality in his creation of “nymphets,” and through its intense intertextual dialogue with the romantic poet Edgar Allan Poe, the novel continues the tradition of romanticism. It shares with modernism an interest in processes of perception and reality constitution, while through its ironic tone, the leveling of dramatic build-up, and the use of intertextual and metafictional strategies Lolita subscribes to postmodernist aesthetics.