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their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in "Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary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. |
Contents
Part II Sanitation and the City | 49 |
Part III Polluting the Bourgeois | 131 |
Part IV Dirty Modernism | 223 |
Contributors | 303 |
Index | 307 |
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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
Popular passages
Page 13 - See dying vegetables life sustain, See life dissolving vegetate again : All forms that perish other forms supply, (By turns we catch the vital breath, and die) Like bubbles on the sea of matter born, They rise, they break, and to that sea return.
Page 241 - Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments
Page 10 - What hast thou more to boast of? Will thy lovers Flock round thee now, to gaze and do thee homage ' Methinks I see thee with thy head low laid ; Whilst surfeited upon thy damask cheek, The high-fed worm, in lazy volumes roll'd, Riots unscar'd. For this was all thy caution? For this thy painful labours at thy glass, T' improve those charms, and keep them in repair, For which the spoiler thanks thee not?
Page 9 - All flesh is grass," is not only metaphorically, but literally true; for all those creatures we behold are but the herbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in ourselves.
Page 9 - Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service; two dishes, but to one table: that's the end.
Page 247 - Was it all to end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap, with Podsnap's drawing-room in the office, and a Whig committee dealing out champagne to the rich and margarine to the poor in such convenient proportions as would make all men contented together...
Page 94 - That's to drown you in, my dears !" Not a lumbering black barge, with its cracked and blistered side impending over them, but seemed to suck at the river with a thirst for sucking them under. And everything so vaunted the spoiling influences of water — discoloured copper, rotten wood, honey-combed stone, green dank deposit — that the after-consequences of being crushed, sucked under, and drawn down, looked as ugly to the imagination as the main event.
Page 10 - Of the same common nature with his lord ;) Now tame and humble, like a child that's whipp'd, Shakes hands with dust, and calls the worm his kinsman; Nor pleads his rank and birthright. Under ground Precedency's a jest : vassal and lord, Grossly familiar, side by side consume. When self-esteem, or others...
Page 40 - Thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.