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their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in "Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary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
... Matter: Imperial Filth Joseph W. Childers 201 Part IV. Dirty Modernism 10. The Dustbins of History: Waste Management in Late-Victorian Utopias Natalka Freeland 225 11. The Indian Subject of Colonial Hygiene William Kupinse 250 12 ...
... Matter: Imperial Filth Joseph W. Childers 201 Part IV. Dirty Modernism 10. The Dustbins of History: Waste Management in Late-Victorian Utopias Natalka Freeland 225 11. The Indian Subject of Colonial Hygiene William Kupinse 250 12 ...
Page xi
... matter out of place . Douglas proposes that an awareness of dirt indicates the existence of system : nothing is inherently dirty ; dirt is simply “ matter ” that , within a particular framework , appears in the wrong location , and so ...
... matter out of place . Douglas proposes that an awareness of dirt indicates the existence of system : nothing is inherently dirty ; dirt is simply “ matter ” that , within a particular framework , appears in the wrong location , and so ...
Page xv
... matter that seems most worthless . In this view , almost anything can be recuperated as durable , although Thompson's focus on furniture , housing stock , and col- lectibles -a very bourgeois universe of discarded objects — keeps the ...
... matter that seems most worthless . In this view , almost anything can be recuperated as durable , although Thompson's focus on furniture , housing stock , and col- lectibles -a very bourgeois universe of discarded objects — keeps the ...
Page xxiv
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Page xxv
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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