Filth: Dirt, Disgust, And Modern LifeWilliam A. Cohen, Ryan Johnson U of Minnesota Press - 317 pages From floating barges of urban refuse to dung-encrusted works of art, from toxic landfills to dirty movies, filth has become a major presence and a point of volatile contention in modern life. This book explores the question of what filth has to do with culture: what critical role the lost, the rejected, the abject, and the dirty play in social management and identity formation. It suggests the ongoing power of culturally mandated categories of exclusion and repression. Focusing on filth in literary and cultural materials from London, Paris, and their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in "Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary phobias, the fictional representation of laboring women and foreigners as polluting, and relations among disease, disorder, and sexual-racial disharmony. "Filth provides the first sustained consideration, both theoretical and historical, of a subject whose power to horrify, fascinate, and repel is as old as civilization itself. |
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Page vii
... York City witnessed a propitious conjunction of literal and metaphorical Wlth. With the imminent closing of the Fresh Kills LandWll in Staten Island—the largest garbage dump in the world—the city faced a crisis over where to send the ...
... York City witnessed a propitious conjunction of literal and metaphorical Wlth. With the imminent closing of the Fresh Kills LandWll in Staten Island—the largest garbage dump in the world—the city faced a crisis over where to send the ...
Page viii
... York's garbage to Virginia, he said: “People in Virginia like to utilize New York because we're a cultural center, a business center. . . . What goes along with being a cultural and business center is you're very crowded. We don't have ...
... York's garbage to Virginia, he said: “People in Virginia like to utilize New York because we're a cultural center, a business center. . . . What goes along with being a cultural and business center is you're very crowded. We don't have ...
Page xxii
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Page xxxi
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Page xxxii
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Common terms and phrases
abject aesthetic Alfred Jarry anxiety argued artistic Bataille Bleak House bodily bourgeois British Cambridge century Chadwick chapter cholera city’s clean cleanliness colonial contamination Coolie Cremation cultural Day’s death deWned deWnition Dickens Dickens’s dirt dirty discourse disease disgust dust England English excrement Francis Seymour Haden French George Du Maurier Hatterr heterology Holmes human hygienic identity identiWed Indian Jarry Jarry’s la bohème literary Little Billee London mapping Mary Douglas matter Maurier merdre metaphor middle-class modern Morris’s Munoo Mutual Friend narrative narrator nineteenth nineteenth-century novel odors Oletarians Oxford Paris Parisian Père Ubu political pollution prostitution puriWcation Rachilde representation reXected river Routledge Sabbatian sanitary reform sanitation scatology Scholem scientiWc sewer sexual Sign of Four signiWcant smell space speciWc Stallybrass stench Stink story Svengali Thames tion trans Trilby Ubu Roi University Press urban Victorian waste Watson Wction Wgure Wlth Wlthy Wnal Wnally Wrst York