ABSTRACT
Like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lolita was the subject of a major literary-social controversy at the turn of the 1960s involving the relation of unconventional sexuality to an indeterminate borderline between literature and pornography. The public scandal then finds it way right into the book. My British Corgi paperback, for instance, is padded with soundbite testimonials at the back from leading literary experts divided by country and ranging from Lionel Trilling’s early defence in Encounter (‘not about sex, but about love’), to Bernard Levin (‘certain of a permanent place on the very highest shelf of the world’s didactic literature’).1 There is also the afterword ‘On a book entitled Lolita’ written by Nabokov at the end of 1956, in the wake of initial reactions to the first publication in Paris.2
