Border-crossing Of Genre In Lolita And Pale Fire

Nabokov's writings include novel, poetry, drama, biography, and literary criticism, etc., in which the novel represents his highest literary achievement. His novels clearly show the feature of border-crossing of genre. At present the cross-genre writing is flourishing, so it is necessary to study such a practitioner of genre innovation in early times. This thesis takes his representative works Lolita and Pale Fire as examples to illustrate the argument. In Lolita, the cruel but articulate character Humbert tries to trick the readers into sympathy in his confession. Various genres are adopted by Humbert as complementary parts to his monologue so that it can be more convincing. Being composed of foreword, one poem of four cantos, commentary and index, Pale Fire is commented as "the first major formal innovation in the novel since Finnegan's Wake"(Marowski, 1988, p. 290). Intertextuality among four parts of the text is the main feature of this striking example of postmodern fiction.This thesis uses the theories of narratology and postmodernism to analyze the border-crossing between novel and poetry, drama, even commentary, letter and diary by collaging or borrowing techniques. Significance of such border-crossing to literature form innovation and aesthetic effect enhancement is also explored. The author also analyzes why there are so much border-crossing emerging in Lolita and Pale Fire from both subjective and objective aspects. Through textual analysis, this thesis helps to deepen the understanding of Nabokov's literary works and enrich the study of cross-genre writing.This thesis is divided into five chapters.Chapter I introduces briefly literary works of Nabokov and status of the research to his works at home and abroad. This chapter also states the arguments, research methods and research significance in this thesis.Chapter II introduces the definitions of genre and cross-genre. Different understandings and definitions of genre in Chinese and Western literary theory are introduced, features of fiction as a genre being defined particularly. The dialectical relationship between form and content is discussed because "this is the premise on which rests so much of the hostile criticism directed at Nabokov's work" ( Pifer, 1980:2). As a trend at present, cross-genre writing is flourishing and attracting more and more attention. There is no universally recognized definition yet. The discussion about it is hot and controversialChapter III interprets the phenomenon of border-crossing of genre in Nabokov's representative fiction Lolita and Pale Fire, and analyzes the special aesthetic effect caused by the breakthrough in the form. Different genres in Lolita serve as narrative strategies. Different parts in Pale Fire form a multi-layered postmodern text with intertextuality feature.Chapter IV analyzes the reasons of border-crossing of genre in Lolita and Pale Fire from objective and subjective aspects respectively. The objective factors include evolving law of genre and socio-cultural background. Nabokov's unique life experience and liberal ideas, his views on literature and aesthetics are the subjective factors.Chapter V is the conclusion part of the thesis. The conclusion reached through the analysis is that Nabokov as an earlier practitioner of genre innovation is successful in cross-genre writing. Different from the later writers who put together different genres randomly only for the purpose of innovation, Nabokov breaks through genre restriction and strengthens the aesthetic effect in his novels at the same time, thus a number of classic works achieved.