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their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in "Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary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. |
From inside the book
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Page vii
... clean up New York, both materially and morally. Changes in the city's landscape during his tenure were tangible ... cleaned the windows of cars stopped in traffic for spare change; befouling city streets with crimes from drunkenness to ...
... clean up New York, both materially and morally. Changes in the city's landscape during his tenure were tangible ... cleaned the windows of cars stopped in traffic for spare change; befouling city streets with crimes from drunkenness to ...
Page ix
... clean it up , surpassed its previous dimensions . Shift- ing social formations and the means developed for responding to them changed the physical topography of the city — with new slums , factories , sewers , and river embankments — as ...
... clean it up , surpassed its previous dimensions . Shift- ing social formations and the means developed for responding to them changed the physical topography of the city — with new slums , factories , sewers , and river embankments — as ...
Page xii
... clean , desiccated form of ashes and dust that they are so con- ceivable ; a direct encounter with them is almost always polluting . A book that lays out some of these principles , William Ian Miller's Anatomy of Disgust ( 1997 ) ...
... clean , desiccated form of ashes and dust that they are so con- ceivable ; a direct encounter with them is almost always polluting . A book that lays out some of these principles , William Ian Miller's Anatomy of Disgust ( 1997 ) ...
Page xv
... clean / dirty is one ( but not the only ) manifestation of a broader opposition between high and low , they em- phasize the potential creative fecundity of transgressive experiences . Retaining Douglas's structuralism , Stallybrass and ...
... clean / dirty is one ( but not the only ) manifestation of a broader opposition between high and low , they em- phasize the potential creative fecundity of transgressive experiences . Retaining Douglas's structuralism , Stallybrass and ...
Page xviii
... clean linen, rather than clean skin, the sign of hygiene and respectabil- ity (propreté) for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but immersing the body in water was long thought to be dangerous rather than salubrious ...
... clean linen, rather than clean skin, the sign of hygiene and respectabil- ity (propreté) for much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but immersing the body in water was long thought to be dangerous rather than salubrious ...
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Common terms and phrases
abject aesthetic Alfred Jarry anxiety argued artistic audience Bataille Bleak House bodily bohème bohemian bourgeois British Cambridge century chapter cholera clean cleanliness colonial contamination Coolie Cremation critics cultural death Dickens dirt dirty discourse disease disgust dust England English essay excrement fetishism fiction filth Francis Seymour Haden French George Du Maurier Hatterr heterology Holmes hygienic identity imagination Indian insisted Jarry la bohème literary Little Billee London mapping Mary Douglas matter Maurier merdre metaphor middle-class modern Munoo Mutual Friend narrative narrator nineteenth nineteenth-century novel odors Oletarians Oxford Paris Parisian Père Ubu political pollution prostitution Rachilde representation response river Routledge Sabbatian sanitary reform sanitation scatology Scholem sewage sewer sexual Sign of Four smell social body space Stallybrass stench Stink story Study in Scarlet suggests Svengali Thames tion trans Trilby Ubu Roi University Press urban Victorian Watson writes York