Books > History/Anthropology > French Historians and philosophers > Foul and the Fragrant
Foul and the Fragrant
Reference : 9780674311763
Author : Alain corbin, Kochan Miriam L(Translator)
Number of page : 320
Edition : Harvard University Press
Release date : 1988-04-01
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.
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.
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