A thought provoking, innovative study that combines pioneering scholarship to produce a novel vision of nineteenth-century culture and contemporary philosophy.---–Mitchell Greenberg, Cornell University "I recommend reading this book by dim light--from candles or gas if possible. But don't let this enjoyable horror tale's lithe prose fool you. Serious theoretical work connects the cholera, corpses, miasmas, necrophiliacs, prostitutes, rag pickers, sewage, and other forms of "abjection" explicated in this volume.... This is an intricately interdisciplinary work, which would nevertheless speak fluently with older approaches from intellectual history and the history of ideas. Informed broadly by the wide arc of continental theory--including phenomenology and hermeneutics, dialectics, existentialism, post/structuralism, and above all psychoanalysis--Strauss also incorporates notable elements of visual studies, comparative literature, and recent interest in "literature and science." He smoothly blends literary history, criticism, and theory with political history, criticism, and theory."― Peter S. Soppelsa (—H-Urban) Strauss examines the role played by a medical field that had recently gained considerable prestige, and the variety of discourses that accompanied the nineteenth-century's obsessive interest in the dead, testifying to an 'inadmissible desire for the abject'. This is an important and dazzling work.---—Marie Helene Huet, Princeton University The pages pullulate with life and death, and the mesmerizing world of nineteenth-century Paris will at once disgust and entice you. This is a book that trades powerfully on its academic credentials, but which deserves equal success in a more popular sphere for its ability to communicate the morbid fascination of its subject matter. (The British Society for Literature and Science)
