Introduction & Overview of Reading Lolita in Tehran, A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi

Reading Lolita in Tehran, A Memoir in Books Introduction

Azar Nafisi's memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003), describes her experiences living in Iran from 1979 to 1997. The country had just undergone a revolution when she returned in the late 1970s from schooling abroad, and an oppressive theocracy took the place of a western-influenced monarchy. Nafisi, a native of Iran who had received much of her education in Europe and the United States, found nearly every aspect of her life was constrained by the social, cultural, and political conditions under which she lived. Though she was demoralized by her increasingly diminished status as a woman and by the restrictions placed on her as a university professor, Nafisi never lost her love and appreciation of literature.

In Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi intertwines her group-based discussions and own interpretations of novels such as Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Henry James's Daisy...
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