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their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in "Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary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 viii
... essays devoted to the subject of filth , and several reasons explain its appearance now . One is the contempo- rary urgency of the subject , encapsulated in the examples from New York City . Another reason is the evolution of academic ...
... essays devoted to the subject of filth , and several reasons explain its appearance now . One is the contempo- rary urgency of the subject , encapsulated in the examples from New York City . Another reason is the evolution of academic ...
Page ix
... essays in this volume take up a range of filthy topics , but they are bound together by a predominant focus on nineteenth - century Europe's foremost urban and cultural centers , London and Paris . In this period , the population of ...
... essays in this volume take up a range of filthy topics , but they are bound together by a predominant focus on nineteenth - century Europe's foremost urban and cultural centers , London and Paris . In this period , the population of ...
Page xii
... Essay on Abjection ( 1980 ) , which brings Douglas's theory together with Freud's and Sartre's . Kristeva associates a repudiated maternal figure with “ the abject ” and affiliated notions of disgusting , rejected objects and experi ...
... Essay on Abjection ( 1980 ) , which brings Douglas's theory together with Freud's and Sartre's . Kristeva associates a repudiated maternal figure with “ the abject ” and affiliated notions of disgusting , rejected objects and experi ...
Page xvii
... essays, Allan Stoekl writes that “The fall of one system is not stabilized, is not replaced with the eleva- tion of another. . . . Filth does not 'replace' God; there is no new sys- tem of values, no new hierarchy. In the Documents ...
... essays, Allan Stoekl writes that “The fall of one system is not stabilized, is not replaced with the eleva- tion of another. . . . Filth does not 'replace' God; there is no new sys- tem of values, no new hierarchy. In the Documents ...
Page xxxi
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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