Filth

Filth

Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life

William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, editors

Table of Contents

$23.00 Paper
ISBN 0-8166-4300-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4300-4

$69.00 Cloth
ISBN 0-8166-4299-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4299-1

What waste reveals about the culture that creates it.

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their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary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.

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. from the Department of English at Stanford University, where he has served as general editor of the Stanford Humanities Review.

368 pages | 11 halftones | 5 7/8 x 9 | 2005

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Locating Filth
William A. Cohen

PART I: Fundamentals of Filth
1. Good and Intimate Filth
Christopher Hamlin
2. The New Historicism and the Psychopathology of Everyday Modern Life
David Trotter

PART II: Sanitation and the City
3. Sewage Treatments: Vertical Space and Waste in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London
David L. Pike
4. Medical Mapping: The Thames, the Body, and Our Mutual Friend
Pamela K. Gilbert
5. Confronting Sensory Crisis in the Great Stinks of London and Paris
David S. Barnes

PART III: Polluting the Bourgeois
6. Victorian Dust Traps
Eileen Cleere
7. "Dirty Pleasure": Trilby's Filth
Joseph Bristow
8. Merdre! Performing Filth in the Bourgeois Public Sphere
Neil Blackadder
9. Foreign Matter: Imperial Filth
Joseph W. Childers

PART IV: Dirty Modernism
10. The Dustbins of History: Waste Management in Late-Victorian Utopias
Natalka Freeland
11. The Indian Subject of Colonial Hygiene
William Kupinse
12. Abject Academy
Benjamin Lazier

Contributers
Index



Filth *Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life* William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, editors Table of Contents		$23.00 Paper ISBN 0-8166-4300-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4300-4 $69.00 Cloth ISBN 0-8166-4299-0 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4299-1
What waste reveals about the culture that creates it. 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. 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. from the Department of English at Stanford University, where he has served as general editor of the Stanford Humanities Review. 368 pages \| 11 halftones \| 5 7/8 x 9 \| 2005 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Locating Filth William A. Cohen PART I: Fundamentals of Filth 1. Good and Intimate Filth Christopher Hamlin 2. The New Historicism and the Psychopathology of Everyday Modern Life David Trotter PART II: Sanitation and the City 3. Sewage Treatments: Vertical Space and Waste in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London David L. Pike 4. Medical Mapping: The Thames, the Body, and Our Mutual Friend Pamela K. Gilbert 5. Confronting Sensory Crisis in the Great Stinks of London and Paris David S. Barnes PART III: Polluting the Bourgeois 6. Victorian Dust Traps Eileen Cleere 7. "Dirty Pleasure": Trilby's Filth Joseph Bristow 8. Merdre! Performing Filth in the Bourgeois Public Sphere Neil Blackadder 9. Foreign Matter: Imperial Filth Joseph W. Childers PART IV: Dirty Modernism 10. The Dustbins of History: Waste Management in Late-Victorian Utopias Natalka Freeland 11. The Indian Subject of Colonial Hygiene William Kupinse 12. Abject Academy Benjamin Lazier Contributers Index