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Dirt, Disgust, And Modern Life by William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson |
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| 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their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary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. Contributors: David S. Barnes, Neil Blackadder, Joseph Bristow, Joseph W. Childers, Eileen Cleere, Natalka Freeland, Pamela K. Gilbert, Christopher Hamlin, William Kupinse, Benjamin Lazier, David L. Pike, David Trotter. |
Filth Dirt, Disgust, And Modern Life by William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Order a copy. Reviewed in Out of the Past |
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