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their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in "Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary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
Results 1-5 of 90
Page ix
... nineteenth - century Europe's foremost urban and cultural centers , London and Paris . In this period , the population of cities swelled enormously ; the resulting urban filth , and the efforts to clean it up , surpassed its previous ...
... nineteenth - century Europe's foremost urban and cultural centers , London and Paris . In this period , the population of cities swelled enormously ; the resulting urban filth , and the efforts to clean it up , surpassed its previous ...
Page xiv
... 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 riches . The frequently recounted ( if improbable ) ...
... 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 riches . The frequently recounted ( if improbable ) ...
Page xvi
... nineteenth - century lumpenproletariats and the slums they inhabit are represented in terms continuous with those of base animal- ity ( pigs and rats ) , with the “ lower bodily stratum , ” and with castigated forms of sexuality.13 ...
... nineteenth - century lumpenproletariats and the slums they inhabit are represented in terms continuous with those of base animal- ity ( pigs and rats ) , with the “ lower bodily stratum , ” and with castigated forms of sexuality.13 ...
Page xvii
... nineteenth century, Trotter distinguishes mess from objects and phenomena that psychoanalytic and economic interpretations explain as overdetermined waste by bringing them within a rational, bisected system of order ver- sus disorder ...
... nineteenth century, Trotter distinguishes mess from objects and phenomena that psychoanalytic and economic interpretations explain as overdetermined waste by bringing them within a rational, bisected system of order ver- sus disorder ...
Page xviii
... nineteenth century, filth often instituted discriminations based on religious doctrine and manners.20 Stephen Greenblatt has argued, for instance, that in the period around the Re-formation, doctrinal and affective differences between ...
... nineteenth century, filth often instituted discriminations based on religious doctrine and manners.20 Stephen Greenblatt has argued, for instance, that in the period around the Re-formation, doctrinal and affective differences between ...
Other editions - View all
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