Significant Corpus of Work has Recently Emerged on bodily discipline in literature and the ideological motivations for the repression and expression of vulgar bodily functions. Yet, until now, nobody has located the discussion of the sanitized body's place in literature and society within a Canadian context. In Scatology and Civility in the English Canadian Novel, Reinhold Kramer explores how English-Canadian novelists have reimagined the social history of bodily waste, and how their images of civilization and culture make use of representations of obscenity.Scatology and Civility surveys over eighty Canadian novels, from renowned works by Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, and Leonard Cohen to lesser known works by writers like Harold Sonny Ladoo, Chris Scott, Wayne Johnston, and David Williams. Kramer begins with an investigation into the history of sanitation and the social history of courtesy and manners books; he then speculates about the origins of the 'unclean self' in literature, and about the ideological uses to which filth has been put in the Canadian novel. In considering the language of obscenity from a variety of perspectives which include class, politics, science, gender, race, and religion, Kramer reveals that bodily waste is often an explicit object of textual discourse.As an innovative, interdisciplinary study in the evolution of the depiction of civility and obscenity, Scatology and Civility in the English Canadian Novel will interest those in literary studies, history, sociology, and Canadian studies, and provide new ways of thinking about the volatility of representation.