Is any kind of sex still taboo in literature?

Yes. But there are novelists working on that…

Nigel Farndale 8 March 2014

The first gay marriage will be conducted this Easter, and those who still object to the idea find themselves in a minority. The majority, according to polls, can’t see what all the fuss is about.How far we have travelled in a relatively short period of time. Until 1967, the punishment for homosexuality was a year in prison, or chemical castration, which was the option taken by Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park codebreaker. At least he has now been posthumously pardoned, so that’s OK. Extreme though attitudes to homosexuality have been in the past, I don’t think that, as a subject, it ever had the status of a taboo, not properly. Consider the way that, long before the new spirit of tolerance emerged, novelists were able to write about it without censure. Explorations ranged from the subtle, such as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, to the overt, such as E.M. Forster’s Maurice and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. And such has been its prevalence in more recent years — thanks to the likes of Edmund White, Alan Hollinghurst and Colm Tóibín — that it can now be considered a popular genre.[  ] Social attitudes do ebb and flow, of course. Could Lolita (1955) be published for the first time today? I doubt it. The publishers would be surrounded by torch-carrying mobs calling for Nabokov and other ‘paediatricians’ to be lynched. But I can’t see novels dealing with consensual ‘vanilla’ sex, be it heterosexual or homosexual, ever having the power to shock again.Certain other sexual acts remain taboo no matter what else is going on in society. Take bestiality, necrophilia and, perhaps the biggest no-no of them all, incest. In 1967, there was a limit to the then new concept of tolerance about sex between consenting adults. Even though the Wolfenden Report took its inspiration from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty — and his contention that the law ought not concern itself with ‘private immorality’ — it was agreed that incest should remain a criminal offence. ‘The general feeling of history and society on that matter is that it ought not to be tolerated,’ Sir John Wolfenden declared.  http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9151821/is-any-kind-of-sex-still-taboo-in-literature/

Jansy Mello:  “Lolita” is the permanent association of Nabokov to “forbidden themes”. Here there’s no mention to incest in his novels…