Mirrors of Madness: Emotional Blindness, Narcissistic Doubling and Paranoia in Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962)

Sabine Ursula Mercer shows how during the 1950s – the heyday of psychoanalytic therapy – the representation of paranoid minds in literature reflected a problem endemic in Western societies. Delusion in fiction questioned the basis of reality, and thus mirrored the cultural obsession that gave rise to Freud and therapy.