Filth: dirt, disgust, and modern life book

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

Contributors

Index

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their colonial outposts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the essays in Filth, all but one previously unpublished, range over topics as diverse as the building of sewers in nineteenth-century European metropolises, the link between interior design and bourgeois sanitary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

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/filth