The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination [Paperback]

Alain Corbin (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This is a fascinating but difficult book, rooted in the commitment to "total" history pioneered by the French Annales school. Highly original and interdisciplinary, it discusses the development of Western attitudes about smell: changing theories about odors and their meaning. The author, a French history professor, traces modern attitudes to the public health movement of 18th-century France, where scientists studying the chemistry of air campaigned against the dangers of odoriferous slaughterhouses, cesspoools, swamps, corpses, and prisons. Various changes in behavior resulted: new theories about perfume, rituals of bodily hygiene, and polite revulsion at the "stinking" urban masses. For specialists in history, literature, and medicine. Marie Marmo Mullaney, History Dept., Caldwell Coll., N.J.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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 )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (January 1, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674311760
• ISBN-13: 978-0674311763
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #717,551 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars smell, November 21, 2009

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Deborah M. Przedpelska "shiva" (kjelsås) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination (Paperback)

Tis is fantastic book if you are intrested in history written from other point of view then we are used to.
I have understood partly how people lived couple hundred years ago and this is great