Analysis Of The Metafictionality In Lolita

Nabokov is recognized as one of the greatest literary stylists of the 20th century who have exerted profound influence on American postmodern literature and heralded the epoch-making rise of it. Besides, he is also one of the controversial novelists. His Lolita, once a famous officially banned book, brought great fame to him.In the 1960s, some American novelists abandoned and surpassed the traditional fiction creation skills, and initiated a kind of new fiction style--metafiction, which attached great importance to the self-revealing and tentative language instead of character building and plot developing. The famous novel Lolita by Nabokov is well-known for its metafictionality. In this thesis, postmodern narrative is applied to the analysis of the metafictionality in Lolita so as to find out its function in showing the literary views of Nabokov.This thesis attempts to elaborate the expression features of metafictionality in Lolita, which shows Nabokov's keen self-consciousness and his anti-traditional literary views. This thesis consists of three chapters in addition to Introduction and Conclusion.The Introduction briefly mentions the motivation and origin of the thesis and the former studies on Nabokov and his Lolita. The originality of the thesis will be pointed out in this part: the thesis will offer a relatively systematical and methodical study of metafictionality in Lolita from the perspective of postmodernism. There have been a great number of periodicals and theses offering relative in-depth analysis on Lolita's other features. But research on metafictionality of Lolita is far from being adequate. Therefore, grounded on specific analysis methods including literature analytical method, statistics, synthesis along with my own comprehension and research on this topic, this thesis aims at making some contribution to the analysis of the metafictionality in Lolita with relatively further extension and unfolding of details.Beginning with the origin of the thesis, definition and main features, chapter one discusses a special writing style in postmodern novel creation---metafiction. The focus of metafiction consists in a world of ideas and images rather than basic elements of novel. This kind of fiction neglects coping or reflecting the true panorama of the world or life, but mere a part of it; it is utterly self-conscious of its presence as a linguistic structure, an artifice, and an object made of words. The typically metafictional narrative elements adopted in Lolita are special point of view, involuted design, wordplay and poetic prose style to achieve the effect of unreality and uncertainty. This chapter also traces the origin of the study of Nabokov from the perspective of metafiction.Chapter two deals with the essential features of metafictionality in Lolita from three aspects: unreality in characters, unreality in plot and uncertainty in theme. This chapter is one of the major parts of the thesis.On the basis of chapter two, chapter three mainly analyzes the main narrative elements in Lolita which makes the works possess the features of metafictionality. Some representative narrative elements have been selected here: special point of view, the involuted design, wordplay and poetic prose style. Among them, the involuted design has been detailed from there main facets: parody, allusion and work-within-the-work.The last part is the conclusion of the whole thesis: this thesis attempts to amplify the main features and narrative elements of the metafictionality in Lolita, which shows Nabokov's keen self-consciousness and his anti-traditional literary views. Nabokov has exerted profound influence on American postmodern literature.