The Foul & the Fragrant - Odor & the French Social Imagination (Cloth) - Tapa dura

This book is not only serious, but interesting and important; one of those studies that profoundly alters our understanding of both social life and history. -- Joan W. Scott "New York Times Book Review" [This book] is not only serious, but interesting and important; one of those studies that profoundly alters our understanding of both social life and history.--Joan W. Scott "New York Times Book Review " At once encyclopedic and impressionistic, "The Foul and the Fragrant" is...a masterful exposition of odors and the perception of odors from 1750 to the "Pasteurian revolution" of the late nineteenth century...It is an important and, at times, fascinating voyage...Exploring with imagination and audacity the changing role of smell in the anxieties and antagonisms of the modern world, Corbin reminds us that social history, too long sanitized and too often abstract, must make room for the senses.--Michael Burns "Los Angeles Times Book Review " The story has never been told more brilliantly, nor with such verve and perceptiveness. That alone would make Corbin's book worth reading, but one may read it as well for a deeper understanding of the roots of modern urban anxieties about the unwholesome...Corbin's book is a tour de force.--Simon Schama "New Republic "

In a book whose insight and originality have already had a dazzling impact in France, Alain Corbin has put the sense of smell on the historical map. He conjures up the dominion that the combined forces of smells--from the seductress's civet to the ubiquitous excremental odors of city cesspools--exercised over the lives (and deaths) of the French in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.