The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Frederic Soulie’s Memoirs of the Devil (1837) is a typical example [of a gothic novel], full of adultery, incest and murder, and with a climax in which the devil causes the villain’s castle to be swallowed up in an abyss." --The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988) by Colin Wilson |
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The Misfits: A Study of Sexual Outsiders (1988) is a book on human sexuality, literature and morality by Colin Wilson.
Synopsis: The history of human civilization is the history of daydreaming, escapism and imagination. The book elaborates the nature of fiction, drama and the novel in its relationship to sexual imagination and sex crimes. Wilson seeks to establish a link between crime and sexual perversion, via displacement activities.
The book contains biographies of the Marquis de Sade, D.H. Lawrence, A. C. Swinburne, James Joyce, Yukio Mishima, Henry Miller, Tillich, Koestler, Percy Grainger, Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Charlotte Bach.
TOC
Acknowledgements
ONE: The Secret of Charlotte Bach
TWO: Charlotte and the Mysteries of Evolution
THREE: Anarchy Incarnate
On Sade
Wilson states that Marquis de Sade's philosophy was one of extreme selfishness, mentioning Sade's denial of the existence of benevolence and altruism. Wilson's portrait of Sade one of the first well-balanced around, neither villifying (as it was customary during the 19th century) nor exalting him as it was done in the 20th century (see De Beauvoir and Apollinaire).
FOUR: Romantic Agonies
FIVE: Rebel Angel
SIX: From Rebellion to Sex Crime
SEVEN: Victorian Misfits
EIGHT: Guilt and Defiance
NINE: Misfits or Mystics?
POSTSCRIPT: The Fifth Window
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