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For grokking surprisingly prevalent scatological representations in early Eng lit

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Between Two Stools: Scatology and its Representations in English Literature, Chaucer to Swift

EXCERPT: [...] Peter Smith’s overall argument is simple: English literature from the 18th century or earlier cannot be properly and fully interpreted without understanding that scatological references at that time were even more prevalent than they are today, and that contemporary reactions to the scatological were less “Puritanical” than ours. In his view the 20th and 21st centuries are neo-Victorian in their prudishness, which he proves by convincingly reinterpreting many scatological references modern scholars have missed in canonical literature. His discoveries are all the more surprising in academic fields as long-standing and crowded as Shakespeare’s.

But that’s not to say that this book’s audience is strictly academic. Between Two Stools is a lively read, fascinating for anyone who loves English literature. Smith resuscitates old, dirty vocabulary to explain jokes and references lost on modern readers and can’t resist throwing in puns of his own, comparing Gulliver’s Travels to ‘the Fart of Darkness.’ The authors he writes about are mostly familiar and when they’re not, they’re compelling. He explains and defends every last, lewd detail in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; demystifies Shakespeare by showing how plays as varied as Hamlet and Twelfth Night are better understood through a multitude of suggestive nicknames and digestive detail; but also keeps as his lodestar a less-known but fascinating Renaissance how-to manual and celebration of the flushing toilet, written by a renegade English courtier who invented it (the aptly named John Harington). Smith corrects prior readings of these medieval and Renaissance texts and transports the reader back to what Bakhtin called the ‘carnivalesque’ mode of scatology of Early Modern literature. The subsequent shift to Rochester’s poems’ ‘bleak anality’ comes as a jolt.

[...] All in all, Smith delivers a much needed, gripping history of literary excrement which lays solid groundwork for future scholarship – although it’s also a wonderful introduction to what even your most permissive English teacher probably left out....
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