![]() Nabokov states, “ Lolita has no moral in tow.” The novel, he argues, does not exist for any ethical purpose, but simply an aesthetic one. ![]() In his 1959 essay, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” Nabokov argues that the sole purpose of Lolita is “aesthetic bliss,” which he defines as “a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm” (314–315). I argue that these texts emphasize an ethical reading of Lolita by drawing attention to the girl’s victimization while, nonetheless, retaining notable ambiguities that acknowledge the girl’s sexual desire and agency. In this article, I examine several revisionary texts that present Lolita’s voice as a first person narrator, such as Kim Morrissey’s Poems for Men Who Dream of Lolita (1992) Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary (published in Italian in 1995 and translated into English in 1999) and Emily Prager’s Roger Fishbite (1999). Although Lolita has been read as a “love story” ( Patnoe 1995: 83), many feminist scholars have urged readers to reconsider the text from the perspective of Lolita, as a child incest victim. Lolita has also continued to evoke debate on how to read the text-both aesthetically and ethically. ![]() As the quintessential twentieth-century text in this genre, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) has inspired abundant scholarly analyses, popular cultural critiques, and numerous novels, films, and other creative works. Dating back several centuries (recall Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1740), the trope of the sexual encounter between the young girl and her benevolent and/or malevolent father figure has epitomized a tangle of consent, agency, and coercion for the girl.
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