The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

This revised and updated annotated edition of Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel, Jr., features a preface, introduction, and extensive notes that illuminate the novel's elaborate verbal textures, frequent literary allusions, parodies, and cross-references, showing how they contribute to the total design.

Originally published in 1955, Lolita became a cause célèbre for its sophisticated handling of Humbert Humbert's obsessive passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze, blending awe, heartbreak, mordant wit, and a meditation on love as outrage, hallucination, madness, and transformation, while contrasting a hypercivilized European with postwar America's cheerful barbarism.