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their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in "Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary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 x
... excrement instantly taints anything it touches , but it is also the subject of count- less schemes and fantasies for self - sustaining agricultural cycles . Any- thing designated filthy cannot be reused , at least until it is renamed or ...
... excrement instantly taints anything it touches , but it is also the subject of count- less schemes and fantasies for self - sustaining agricultural cycles . Any- thing designated filthy cannot be reused , at least until it is renamed or ...
Page xi
... excrement that comes out of healthy bod- ies is the variety of ( perhaps even filthier ) bodily excretions — blood , vomit , pus , and so on — from sick ones , and other corporeal liquids ( menstrual blood , semen ) that can seem more ...
... excrement that comes out of healthy bod- ies is the variety of ( perhaps even filthier ) bodily excretions — blood , vomit , pus , and so on — from sick ones , and other corporeal liquids ( menstrual blood , semen ) that can seem more ...
Page xiii
... excrement because it comes from him and might be given to another, but he is forced to renounce this attachment as part of his acculturation. The attachment does not simply go away, how- ever; it is sent into the unconscious, where it ...
... excrement because it comes from him and might be given to another, but he is forced to renounce this attachment as part of his acculturation. The attachment does not simply go away, how- ever; it is sent into the unconscious, where it ...
Page xiv
... excrement and its attendant sensory modality , olfaction , privi- leging sight and distance over smell and proximity . According to this developmental model , which each individual recapitulates ontogeneti- cally , “ civilized ” society ...
... excrement and its attendant sensory modality , olfaction , privi- leging sight and distance over smell and proximity . According to this developmental model , which each individual recapitulates ontogeneti- cally , “ civilized ” society ...
Page xv
... excrement is aliment ” will admit that something nearly alchemical has happened when the clutter in the attic suddenly gets bid up in the collectible market . Having moved from the body and sexuality to the economic and social realm ...
... excrement is aliment ” will admit that something nearly alchemical has happened when the clutter in the attic suddenly gets bid up in the collectible market . Having moved from the body and sexuality to the economic and social realm ...
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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