The polyhedral victim and the patchwork abuser: a comparative study of names and naming in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Maria Velho da Costa’s Myra (2008)
In this article, I compare the function of names and the act of naming in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and Maria Velho da Costa's Myra (2008). I situate Nabokov's decision to write a narrative from the perspective of a male abuser and Velho da Costa's centring her novel on a...
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| Format: | Journal article |
| Idioma: | English |
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Modern Humanities Research Association
2020
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| Sumari: | In this article, I compare the function of names and the act of naming in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and Maria Velho da Costa's Myra (2008). I situate Nabokov's decision to write a narrative from the perspective of a male abuser and Velho da Costa's centring her novel on a female victim in the specific contexts in which these works were published. Whereas Lolita stands as a challenge to North American obscenity laws in the 1950s, Myra was written against the backdrop of a child abuse scandal, involving a state orphanage and powerful men from the Portuguese elite.
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