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previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the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,
fictional representations 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, U of Pennsylvania; Neil Blackadder, Knox College;
Joseph Bristow, U of California, Los Angeles; Joseph W. Childers, U
of California, Riverside; Eileen Cleere, Southwestern U; Natalka
Freeland, U of California, Irvine; Pamela K. Gilbert, U of Florida;
Christopher Hamlin, U of Notre Dame; William Kupinse, U of Puget
Sound; Benjamin Lazier, U of Chicago; David L. Pike, American U;
David Trotter, U of Cambridge.William A. Cohen is associate
professor of English at the University of Maryland and the author
of Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction.Ryan Johnson
is completing his Ph.D. in the Department of English at Stanford
University, where he has served as general editor of the Stanford
Humanities Review.
General
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