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Incest in literature

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Incest is an important thematic element and plot device in literature, with famous early examples such as Sophocles' classic Oedipus Rex, a tragedy in which the title character unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother.^[1] It occurs in medieval literature,^[2] both explicitly, as related by denizens of Hell in Dante's Inferno, and winkingly, as between Pandarus and CriseydeinChaucer's Troilus.^[3] The Marquis de Sade was famously fascinated with "perverse" sex acts such as incest,^[4] which recurs frequently in his works,The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), and Juliette (1797).

Modern literature[edit]

Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) deals very heavily with the incestuous relationships in the intricate family tree of the main character, Van Veen.^[5] In his novel Hogg, written in 1969, Samuel R. Delany employed incest as a way to push the boundaries of heteronormative sex.^[6] Toni Morrison's debut novel The Bluest Eye (1970) tells the story of Pecola, a young girl raped by her father. Dorothy Allison wrote about incest and sexual abuse in Trash: Short Stories (1988) and Bastard Out of Carolina (1992).

See also[edit]

• Incest in folklore and mythology
• Incest in the Bible – Aspect of culture
• Incest pornography – Genre of pornography

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Szobel, Ilana (2021). Flesh of My Flesh: Sexual Violence in Modern Hebrew Literature. State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-1-4384-8457-0.
• Leeson, Miles Richard John, ed. (2018). Incest in contemporary literature. Manchester: Manchester university press. ISBN 978-1-5261-2216-2.
• Quilligan, Maureen (2005). Incest and Agency in Elizabeth's England. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-1905-0.
• Rank, Otto (1992). The incest theme in literature and legend: fundamentals of a psychology of literary creation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-4176-7.
• Rodi-Risberg, Marinella (2022). Intersectional Trauma in American Women Writers' Incest Novels from the 1990s. Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-96619-5. ISBN 978-3-030-96618-8.
• Rouillard, Linda Marie (2020). Medieval Considerations of Incest, Marriage, and Penance. Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-35602-6. ISBN 978-3-030-35601-9.

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