The first collection of academic essays devoted to the subject of filth -- bodily wastes, cultural refuse and figurative dirt -- focuses on how it was confronted in the cultural centers of 19th century Europe, particularly London and Paris.
From historian Christopher Hamlin's examination of how ideas of what was sanitary and what was spiritual overlapped each other in Victorian Britain to Benjamin Lazier's essay, "Abject Academy," the collected papers examine historical, philosophical and even artistic aspects of society's dirt.
"The essays in this volume are local in their attentions, but considered together they contribute to this larger story about filth in the West since the mid-nineteenth century," explains the editors, William Cohen and Ryan Johnson.
The first two chapters of the book cover the "fundamentals of filth," as the editors put it, followed by chapters on "Sanitation and the City" and a section titled "Polluting the Bourgeois" that analyzes filthy cultural products that help shape or repudiate national identities. The final section, "Dirty Modernism," considers the modern legacies of 19th century fantasies about waste and the political and social value of filth perceived in the early 20th century.
Wide-ranging and yet linked by a common thread of disgust, this volume breaks wind in way that no one else has dared.
Dirt, Disgust, And Modern Life
by William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
Out of the Past