Abstract

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.

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