Abstract
The senses involved in the structuring of the characters’ sensuality in King, Queen, Knave, Lolita, and Ada do not differ substantially, yet they manage to produce three different types of sensuality, a shameful one, a guilty one, and an Edenic one. These types are largely the effect of three different kinds of narrative discourses, the first one being chiefly ironic, the second passionate, and self-vindicating, and the third dazzled and highly poetic. Nabokov was acutely aware of being haunted by tyrannical sexual desires and a polymorphous kind of sensuality but he managed to tame them and put them to use to create highly sensual works teeming with poetic images.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Bibliography
Bataille, Georges. 1957. L’Erotisme. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Couturier, Maurice. 2004. Nabokov ou la cruauté du sujet. Seyssel: Champ Vallon.
———. 2014. Nabokov’s Eros and the Poetics of Desire. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nabokov, Vladimir. 1969. Ada or Ardor, A Family Chronicle. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
———. 1928. King, Queen, Knave. Reprint, London: Penguin Classics, 2010.
———. 1966. Speak, Memory. Reprint, Novels and Memoirs 1941–1951, ed. Brian Boyd. New York: Library of America, 1996.
———. 1973. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill.
———. 1955. The Annotated Lolita, ed. A. Appel. Reprint, London: Penguin, 1991.
———. 1986. The Enchanter, trans. D. Nabokov. London: Picador.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Couturier, M. (2020). Sensuality and the Senses in Nabokov. In: Bouchet, M., Loison-Charles, J., Poulin, I. (eds) The Five Senses in Nabokov's Works. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45406-7_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-45405-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-45406-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)