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their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in "Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary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 vi
... Dirty Pleasure”: Trilby's Filth Joseph Bristow 155 8. Merdre! Performing Filth in the Bourgeois Public Sphere Neil Blackadder 182 9. Foreign Matter: Imperial Filth Joseph W. Childers 201 Part IV. Dirty Modernism 10. The Dustbins of ...
... Dirty Pleasure”: Trilby's Filth Joseph Bristow 155 8. Merdre! Performing Filth in the Bourgeois Public Sphere Neil Blackadder 182 9. Foreign Matter: Imperial Filth Joseph W. Childers 201 Part IV. Dirty Modernism 10. The Dustbins of ...
Page vii
... no longer tolerated; and X-rated (“dirty”) movie theaters and sex shops were aggressively driven out. New York residents and visitors regarded these so-called • quality - of - life issues , attached to vii Introduction: Locating Filth.
... no longer tolerated; and X-rated (“dirty”) movie theaters and sex shops were aggressively driven out. New York residents and visitors regarded these so-called • quality - of - life issues , attached to vii Introduction: Locating Filth.
Page viii
... dirty words as about the dis- posable paper on which they are often printed ; it has as much to do with segments of the population rhetorically designated unwashed as with the water supply that might enable their cleansing . Under this ...
... dirty words as about the dis- posable paper on which they are often printed ; it has as much to do with segments of the population rhetorically designated unwashed as with the water supply that might enable their cleansing . Under this ...
Page xi
... dirty , while taking them off can be dirty in an American one — but the funda- mental structure of dirtiness is constant . Pollution is not simply the opposite of cleanliness ; it also arises out of a confusion of categories ...
... dirty , while taking them off can be dirty in an American one — but the funda- mental structure of dirtiness is constant . Pollution is not simply the opposite of cleanliness ; it also arises out of a confusion of categories ...
Page xiv
... dirty , degen- erate hoard . Particularly in the nineteenth century , human excrescences get tangled up in fantasies of emergent value , and polluting substances spill into their apparent opposite , the recyclable source of hidden ...
... dirty , degen- erate hoard . Particularly in the nineteenth century , human excrescences get tangled up in fantasies of emergent value , and polluting substances spill into their apparent opposite , the recyclable source of hidden ...
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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