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.^[1] It occurs in medieval literature,^[2] both explicitly, as related by denizens of Hell in Dante's Inferno, and winkingly, as between Pandarus and Criseyde in Chaucer's Troilus.^[3] The Marquis de Sade was famously fascinated with "perverse" sex acts such as incest,^[4] which recurs frequently in his works,The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), and Juliette (1797).

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Japanese. Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 3,744 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Japanese Wikipedia article at [[:ja:文学における近親相姦]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|ja|文学における近親相姦}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

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.^[5] In his novel Hogg, written in 1969, Samuel R. Delany employed incest as a way to push the boundaries of heteronormative sex.^[6] 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).

• Incest in folklore and mythology
• Incest in the Bible – Aspect of culture
• Incest pornography – Genre of pornography