Nabokov's Lolita: the latest thing millennials have apparently ruined

People keep saying that it would never get past the censorious new generation, rather forgetting its arduous struggle to be printed in the 1950sIf millennials are currently aged between the ages of 22 and 36, I am one, albeit somewhere in the upper echelons – and I am also a publisher. And so I note with particular interest when people who are usually not millennials and don’t work in publishing share their view that Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita would never be published now because of awful young people like me. Not in a million years, they say. Highly unlikely, at a push.It’s a view that pops up with surprising frequency. In the Spectator this week, Rachel Johnson writes that Lolita would be stuck on the slush pile if Nabokov had written it now, casting doubt over whether the classic would even be placed on curriculums any more. Ignoring, of course, that it is on curriculums now. Johnson then asked Dan Franklin – a publisher, granted, but not a millennial – who said he wouldn’t publish it now for fear “a committee of 30-year-olds” would resign in protest because of #MeToo and social media.While promoting her film The Bookshop last year, actor Emily Mortimer also talked about the “sanctimony” of #MeToo, telling the Telegraph: “Lolita would have a hard time being published today.” And Twitter provides a smorgasbord of spluttering about the terrors of our new prudery. Railing against “safe-space publishing”, veteran broadcaster and journalist Iain MacWhirter tweeted: “No one... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2019-03-08 00:00:00 UTC ]
News tagged with: ##metoo #20th century #safe spaces

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