Lolita

Researching a topic you know nothing about can be quite interesting. I choose the word Lolita to research, because it sounded familiar like I had heard somewhere else before. The source I choose first was the Oxford dictionary, in which I looked up the word or name Lolita. What I found was Lolita was “the name of a novel (1958) and its main character by Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) about a precocious schoolgirl seduced by a middle-aged man, used to designate people and situations resembling those in the book”. (Oxford English Dictionary, 1) I also found that the novel Lolita was also a film, by looking at a movie review for the film. The review called Lolita a film worth seeing, it also stated “She still isn't the 12-year-old of the book, but Dominique Swain is an adolescent killer, and Jeremy Irons does some nice suffering.” (Kauffmann, 26) Also by looking at the Oxford dictionary it describes different ways in which the term Lolita has been used in history starting in the year 1959. (Oxford English Dictionary, 1). The website sparknotes has a lot of resourceful information on the novel Lolita, it displays the context of the novel, and it has summaries of each chapter in good detail, character analyses, review questions and further reading. ( Sparknotes) I did research on the author of Lolita and found Vladimir Nabokov was the author who wrote Lolita, he was born in Russia, The Nabokov’s family was known for their high culture and commitment to public service. In 1940 Vladimir moved to the United States where he began writing in English which he really didn’t like doing. Though his passion was not writing in English, one of Vladimir best work Lolita was written in English. (Vladimir Nabokov). The resource I used was again a type of dictionary, but in this dictionary I found a actually definition of the word Lolita it says “a precociously seductive girl” (Merriam Webster Online).