Discursive Killings: Intertextuality, Aestheticization, and Death in Nabokov's Lolita

This essay argues that Nabokov's Lolita is suffused with a rhetoric of death. Humbert Humbert's discursive constructions of Lolita trap her in a semantic web of death that conjures up her literal death in childbed at the age of seventeen. My reading of Lolita traces the fibres of that web in the more sinister implications of Humbert's intertextual references, his persistent gestures of aestheticization and his reflections on the nature of nymphets.