“Meenakshi Gigi Durham’s recent feminist bestseller, The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It, identifies and scrutinizes the millennial popularity of the nymphet, looking beyond the corporatization of the pop princess to an entire cultural industry, film, television, fashion, even toys, dedicated to the eroticization of youth.”
“The fact that Lolita has become a common noun — a linguistic process that goes by the name of antonomasia — indicates how widespread the influence of Nabokov’s nymphet has been.”
On the 60th anniversary of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” the Los Angeles Review of Books has assembled a group of female authors, artists and performers who, dedicated to examining the faces, bodies and voices of the young girl, consider the significance of Nabokov’s pubescent protagonist as both a literary conceit and an object of patriarchal fetish.