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Worshipping Cloacina in the Eighteenth Century: Functions of Scatology in Swift, Pope, Gay, and Sterne

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Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present

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Abstract

At one point in Nick Hornby’s 2005 novels Long Way Down, a number of characters debate taboos in film and, by implication, in literature:

”It’s all part of life, isn’t it?” ”People always say that about unpleasant things I’ll tell you what else is all part of life: going for a crap. No one ever wants to see that, do they? No one ever puts that in a film. Let’s go and watch people take a dump this evening.” ”Who’d let us?... People lock the door.” (253)

Nothing deflates human pretensions to grandeur more quickly... than the satirists insistence upon biological processes.

—Frontein, 301

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Authors
  1. Jens Martin Gurr
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Stefan Horlacher Stefan Glomb Lars Heiler

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© 2010 Stefan Horlacher, Stefan Glomb, and Lars Heiler

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Gurr, J.M. (2010). Worshipping Cloacina in the Eighteenth Century: Functions of Scatology in Swift, Pope, Gay, and Sterne. In: Horlacher, S., Glomb, S., Heiler, L. (eds) Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230105997_6

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