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their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in "Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary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
... artistic expression. The same mayor had made it the hallmark of his administration to clean up New York, both materially and morally. Changes in the city's landscape during his tenure were tangible: there was less garbage on the ...
... artistic expression. The same mayor had made it the hallmark of his administration to clean up New York, both materially and morally. Changes in the city's landscape during his tenure were tangible: there was less garbage on the ...
Page xix
... artistic productions and the psychological theory devoted to explaining it.25 The expanding market and taste for pornography during the nineteenth century further testiWes to the lure and the horror of dirty words. Existing vocabularies ...
... artistic productions and the psychological theory devoted to explaining it.25 The expanding market and taste for pornography during the nineteenth century further testiWes to the lure and the horror of dirty words. Existing vocabularies ...
Page xxvii
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Page xxxvi
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Page 136
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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