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Verse-Novel : Generic Hybridity and the Chamber-Pot
- Style
- Penn State University Press
- Volume 53, Number 3, 2019
- pp. 326-343
- 10.1353/sty.2019.0023
- Article
- Additional Information
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abstract:
A chamber-pot or its equivalent in a work of literature is a generic indicator, prohibiting a text from membership of a high genre. Such objects have appeared in novels from the beginning, but they have not traditionally featured in poetic genres other than satire. While in satire a chamber-pot’s function is usually to evoke disgust, in the realist novel its presence is a signal of the completeness of the material world and the full humanity of the characters. When chamber-pots start to appear in narrative poems, transgressing the rules of the high poetic genres, they mark these narratives as verse-novels, belonging to both poetic and novel genres.