Incest in literature

Incest is an important thematic element and plot device in literature, with famous early examples such as Sophocles' classic Oedipus Rex, a tragedy in which the title character unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother. It occurs in medieval literature, both explicitly, as related by denizens of Hell in Dante's Inferno, and winkingly, as between Pandarus and Criseyde in Chaucer's Troilus. The Marquis de Sade was famously fascinated with "perverse" sex acts such as incest, which recurs frequently in his works,The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), and Juliette (1797).

Modern literature
Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) deals very heavily with the incestuous relationships in the intricate family tree of the main character, Van Veen. In his novel Hogg, written in 1969, Samuel R. Delany employed incest as a way to push the boundaries of heteronormative sex. Toni Morrison's debut novel The Bluest Eye (1970) tells the story of Pecola, a young girl raped by her father. Dorothy Allison wrote about incest and sexual abuse in Trash: Short Stories (1988) and Bastard Out of Carolina (1992).