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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

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The book offers the first systematic Lacanian study of the fiction of John Fowles. Through detailed readings of his six novels, it examines the recurrent misrecognitions of love and failures in relationships in relation to Lacan's theorisation of sexual non-rapport. The study 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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Key Themes

• John Fowles and Psychoanalysis

• Jacques Lacan's theorisation of sexual non-rapport

• Perversion and Sexual Non-rapport 

• Anxiety and Sexual Non-rapport

• Phallic Myth and Femininity

• Traversing the Fantasy of Sexual Rapport 

• Phallic Failure, Invasion of Jouissance and Uninscribability of Sexual Rapport 

• Phallic Impotency and Other Jouissance

• Fowles as a Lacanian 

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The Six Novels

The book examines six novels by John Fowles:

• The Collector

• The French Lieutenant's Woman

• The Magus

• Daniel Martin

• Mantissa

• A Maggot

 

​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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