Includes bibliographical references (pages 211-212) and index.

Introduction / Natalie K. Eschenbaum and Barbara Correll -- Part 1. Sexual encounters -- Dirty jokes: disgust, desire, and the pornographic narrative in Thomas Nashe's The unfortunate traveller / Emily King -- Guyon's Blush: shame, disgust, and desire in The Faerie Queene, book 2 / Barbara Correll -- Desiring disgust in Robert Herrick's Epigrams / Natalie K. Eschenbaum -- Discerning (Dis)taste: delineating sexual mores in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis / Marcela Kostihová -- Part 2. Cultural encounters -- Indecorous customs, rhetorical decorum, and the reception of Herodotean ethnography from Henri Estienne to Edmund Spenser / Galena Hashhozheva -- Food, filth, and the foreign: disgust in the seventeenth-century travelogue / Gitanjali Shahani -- "Qualmish at the smell of leek": overcoming disgust and creating the nation-state in Henry V / Colleen E. Kennedy -- Part 3. Textual encounters -- "The fairing of good counsel": allegory, disgust, and discretion in Jonson's Bartholomew Fair / Ineke Murakami -- Jonson's old age: the force of disgust / Laura Kolb -- "Rankly digested, doth those things out-spue": John Donne, bodily fluids, and the metaphysical abject / Dan Mills -- End matter -- Afterword / Georgia E. Brown.