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Not What You Meant?  There are 16 definitions for Lolita.  Also try: Clare or Humbert or Shōjo.


Lolita Study Guide

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by Vladimir Nabokov
About 36 pages (10,768 words)
Lolita Summary

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Historical Context

Sexuality in the 1950s

Traditional attitudes about sex began to change during the 1950s—the time in which Lolita appeared and just after the period in which Humbert and Lolita were sexually intimate. Dr. Alfred Kinsey's reports on the sexual behavior of men and women (1948, 1953) helped bring discussions of this subject out in the open. Although many Americans clung to puritanical ideas about sexuality, they could not suppress questions that began to be raised about what constituted normal or abnormal sexual behavior. Movie stars like Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot, who openly flaunted their sexuality, intrigued the public; and Playboy magazine, begun in 1953, gained a wide audience. Hugh Hefner, publisher of the magazine, claimed that the magazine's pictures of naked women were symbols of "disobedience, a triumph of sexuality, an end of Puritanism.".....

This is a free excerpt of 135 words. This section contains 618 words. This study guide contains 10,768 words (approx. 36 pages at 300 words per page).

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Lolita from BookRags and Gale's For Students Series. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.

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