FROM THE PUBLISHER

Except as eighteenth-century satiric invective, scatology has almost never been the subject of a full-length study - this despite the insistent references to bodily functions in postwar Canadian literature. This eccentric and interdisciplinary study provides a full listing of examples of scatology in a wide range of Canadian novels from the nineteenth century to the present, and in so doing develops another kind of thematic approach to Canadian prose. Since pollution rites are a culture-specific language, scatology sets up categories of class, race, and gender, although Kramer argues that material signifiers refer to the world and are never purely rhetorical. Scatology as used by Canadian novelists thus raises epistemological problems, alternately undermining and naturalizing political ideologies and religious beliefs.

FROM THE CRITICS

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