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​Lacanian Non-Rapport in the Novels of John Fowles: Impossible Relationships

Mahitosh Mandal
Routledge, 2026

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​About the Book

 ​​The book offers the first systematic Lacanian study of the fiction of John Fowles. Through detailed readings of his six novels, it examines recurrent misrecognitions of love and failures in relationships in relation to Lacan’s theorisation of sexual non-rapport. It explores how Fowles’s characters negotiate the structural impossibility of sexual rapport through fantasy, desire, and symptom, and argues that his fiction can be read as unwittingly Lacanian in its dramatisation of sexual non-rapport. It further argues that this psychoanalytic logic underlies the enigmatic and inconclusive narrative forms associated with Fowles’s postmodernism.

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The book explores themes such as John Fowles and psychoanalysis; Jacques Lacan’s theorisation of sexual non-rapport; perversion and sexual non-rapport in The Collector; anxiety and sexual non-rapport in The Magus; phallic myth and femininity in The French Lieutenant’s Woman; traversing the fantasy of sexual rapport in Daniel Martin; phallic failure, invasion of jouissance, and the uninscribability of sexual rapport in Mantissa; and phallic impotency and other jouissance in A Maggot. The book concludes with a reflection on Fowles as a Lacanian.

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​​Access and Preview

The book is available in hardback and eBook formats. A Preview PDF is also available.

• ​Preview PDF (provided by Routledge): [View PDF] 

• Routledge: Purchase Hardback — [Link]

• Taylor & Francis: Purchase eBook, including individual chapters — [Link]

• Amazon.com: Purchase eBook and Hardback — [Link]

• Google Books: Limited Preview — [Link]

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Contacting for Review

The book was published on 30 August 2026 by Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. If anyone wishes to review the book for a journal, they may contact me at mahitosh.eng@presiuniv.ac.in.

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Reception of the Book

Featured in LacanOnline: The book was featured in the September 2026 newsletter of LacanOnline under "New Publications." The newsletter can be viewed [here].