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their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in "Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary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 xi
... cleanliness ; it also arises out of a confusion of categories . Confronting ambiguity , Douglas argues , can be frightening , but it gen- erates both sacred and taboo objects and practices . Douglas's account of dirt here moves from ...
... cleanliness ; it also arises out of a confusion of categories . Confronting ambiguity , Douglas argues , can be frightening , but it gen- erates both sacred and taboo objects and practices . Douglas's account of dirt here moves from ...
Page xiv
... cleanliness of thoroughfares , its effect was to form a basis for ideas about private property . Filth has value in its very negativity , according to Laporte : “ As a ' private ' thing — each subject's business , each propri- etor's ...
... cleanliness of thoroughfares , its effect was to form a basis for ideas about private property . Filth has value in its very negativity , according to Laporte : “ As a ' private ' thing — each subject's business , each propri- etor's ...
Page xviii
... cleanliness. In this period, Corbin sug- gests, air quality came to be the standard of cleanliness and healthful- ness, while the threshold of tolerable smells was correspondingly low- ered; sanitation became equivalent with eliminating ...
... cleanliness. In this period, Corbin sug- gests, air quality came to be the standard of cleanliness and healthful- ness, while the threshold of tolerable smells was correspondingly low- ered; sanitation became equivalent with eliminating ...
Page xix
... Cleanliness and filth continue to encode and structure self-conceptions in both spiritual and social-class terms during the nineteenth century. The basic form of the Augustinian spiritual autobiography persists: abasement leads to ...
... Cleanliness and filth continue to encode and structure self-conceptions in both spiritual and social-class terms during the nineteenth century. The basic form of the Augustinian spiritual autobiography persists: abasement leads to ...
Page xx
... cleanliness and dirt. Foucault, Stallybrass and White, Laporte, and Corbin share a reading of the bourgeois “obsession” with filthiness and stench, embodied in public health campaigns and the miasma theory of infec- tion, both as a ...
... cleanliness and dirt. Foucault, Stallybrass and White, Laporte, and Corbin share a reading of the bourgeois “obsession” with filthiness and stench, embodied in public health campaigns and the miasma theory of infec- tion, both as a ...
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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