Murderous Desire in Lolita (With Related Thoughts on Mailer's An American Dream)

"Murderous Desire in Lolita" considers Lolita as a transgressive fantasy and compares it with Norman Mailer's novel An American Dream. Engaging D. A. Miller's arguments from The Novel and the Police, the author argues that Mailer and Nabokov are each well aware that they write "under observation" but that each uses narrative contextualization to resist the metaphorical panopticon of literary form.