The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination

by Alain Corbin

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674311752
• ISBN13: 9780674311756
• Release Date: October 1986
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 307 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.