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Discursive Killings: Intertextuality, Aestheticization, and Death in Nabokov's Lolita

Schweighauser, Philipp. (1999) Discursive Killings: Intertextuality, Aestheticization, and Death in Nabokov's Lolita. Amerikastudien, 44 (2). pp. 255-267.

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Abstract

This essay argues that Nabokov's Lolita is suffused with a rhetoric of death. Humbert Humbert's discursive constructions of Lolita trap her in a semantic web of death that conjures up her literal death in childbed at the age of seventeen. My reading of Lolita traces the fibres of that web in the more sinister implications of Humbert's intertextual references, his persistent gestures of aestheticization and his reflections on the nature of nymphets.
Faculties and Departments:04 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > Departement Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften > Fachbereich Englische Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > Amerikanistik (Schweighauser)
UniBasel Contributors:Schweighauser, Philipp
Item Type:Article, refereed
Article Subtype:Research Article
Publisher:Universitätsverlag Winter
ISSN:0340-2827
Note:Publication type according to Uni Basel Research Database: Journal article
Language:English
edoc DOI:
Last Modified:25 Aug 2016 08:33
Deposited On:22 Mar 2012 13:59

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