Abstract
As Fowles’ novels go, The Collector is one of the least complex in terms of structure, yet it is quite complex on both social and psychological levels as well as on a stylistic one. Fowles was deeply influenced by the work of the French writer, Alain-Fournier, and his perceptions of women are not entirely divorced from those. The novel is symbolic. The girl (Miranda) represents good humanity, hope for the future, intelligence, and love while the young man (Clegg) her abductor, represents the opposite: the generous versus the mean. The essay attempts to show how Fowles interrogates the notion of romantic madness, vis-à-vis Clegg’s kidnapping of Miranda, through one of the maddest characters in twentieth-century literature.
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Axelrod-Sokolov, M. (2018). The Madness of Romantic Obsession in Fowles’ The Collector . In: Madness in Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70521-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70521-7_5
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