Literary Lolita: The Classic Lolita's Bookshelf

You know I love anything related to literature, so today it occurred to me, just for fun, to make a list of my reading recommendations for lolitas. However, as I was thinking about it, I realized that the books I wanted to recommend may not really inspire followers of every style, so I'm breaking them down into sub-styles. This is my required reading list for lovers of classic lolita; if it goes over well, I'll work on gothic and sweet lists, too!

What makes a work of literature a classic lolita piece? It was probably written between 1600-1900 in Europe or North America. This collection focuses mainly on novels but also includes essays, plays, and poetry. Early science fiction and the pastoral convention feature heavily. It focuses on themes like the domestic sphere, nature versus society, tradition, art and its importance to the human soul, science and its effects on humanity, and the importance of knowledge of oneself and the world around one. Like the lolita herself, it is classic and timeless with an implication of scandalous experimentation which, though it would cause little commotion these days, certainly rustled the petticoats of its time.

On the Classic Lolita's Bookshelf...

In no particular order:

• Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
• Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• Beauty and the Beast by Marie Le Prince de Beaumont
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• A collection of fairytales by Hans Christian Andersen
• The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• The Passionate Shepherd to his Love by Christopher Marlowe
• Anything by Shakespeare but especially As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, or King Lear, or most of his sonnets.
• A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
• The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anonymous
• Il Canzonere by Francesco Petrarch
• L'Allegro and Il Penseroso by John Milton

Fellow classic lolitas! What's on your bookshelf?



Part of the Literary Lolita series