I will consider the effect this portrayal has on the reception of paedophilia as a subject matter in this text, and discuss how Nabokov’s narrative affects the conveyance of the male paedophile. Its plot follows a lonely young man who kidnaps a female art student in London and holds her captive in the cellar of his rural farmhouse. Finally, I will discuss paedophilia, and how it is represented in Nabokov’s Lolita. The Collector is a 1963 thriller novel by English author John Fowles, in his literary debut. I will also examine whether this is impacted by social attitudes regarding masturbation, and consider the use of public and private spheres.

The third chapter will focus on masturbation, and correlate its representation in relation to ‘gross-out’ and horror fiction to transgressive fiction. I will correlate these representations to tropes aligned with transgressive fiction. The male fetishist will be examined, firstly as a participant in fetishist behaviour, and secondly as a dominant in BDSM practise. Secondly, I will discuss fetishism using a two-fold approach – focusing on fetishism as a collective term for sexual deviances, then looking at BDSM. In this clear and concise book, James Acheson traces the development of Fowles novels from The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenants Woman. I will discuss male homosexuality firstly, looking at the representation of homosexuality as a transgression relative to social surroundings, and creating a link between these representations and the genre of transgressive fiction. The male sexual deviant will be examined across four sexual deviances homosexuality, fetishism, masturbation, and paedophilia. John Fowles’s fiction met with a popular and commercial success that is unusual for a novelist who also received such serious critical attention. In this dissertation, I will discuss the representation of sexual deviance in transgressive fiction, and its relation to the social norms and standards instilled on men between 1910 and the present day.

The collector james fowles