The Annotated Lolita
Revised and Updated
- Who it’s for
- Readers interested in literary allusions and wordplay explained by annotations
- Themes
- Obsessive, doomed passion, Love as madness and transformation, European-American cultural collision
- Pacing
- Reflective
Where it sits
How strongly BookFrontier reads the book as belonging to each subject.
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Nabokov's wise, ironic, and elegant masterpiece. • A controversial love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. • This annotated edition assiduously illuminates the extravagant wordplay and the frequent literary allusions, parodies, and cross-references. • Edited with a preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr.
"Fascinatingly detailed." -Edmund Morris, The New York Times Book Review
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When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. Awe and exhilaration–along with heartbreak and mordant wit–abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.
Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love–love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
Publisher details
Publisher categories
- The Classics
- Literary Fiction
- Psychological Fiction
- Authors
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Publisher
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
- Published
- April 23, 1991
- Format
- Print & ebook
- Reading lane
- The Classics