This collection of essays addresses the belly and the bowels as key elements in our understanding of eighteenth-century mentalities, emotions, and perceptions of the self.

This collection of essays seeks to challenge the notion of the supremacy of the brain as the key organ of the Enlightenment, by focusing on the workings of the bowels and viscera that so obsessed writers and thinkers during the long eighteenth-century. These inner organs and the digestive process acted as counterpoints to politeness and other modes of refined sociability, drawing attention to the deeper workings of the self. Moving beyond recent studies of luxury and conspicuous consumption, where dysfunctional bowels have been represented as a symptom of excess, this book seeks to explore other manifestations of the visceral and to explain how the bowels played a crucial part in eighteenth-century emotions and perceptions of the self. The collection offers an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective on entrails and digestion by addressing urban history, visual studies, literature, medical history, religious history, and material culture in England, France, and Germany.

Introduction: entrails and digestion in the eighteenth century – Rebecca Anne Barr, Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon, Sophie Vasset

Part I: Urban congestion and human digestion
1. The belly and the viscera of the capital city – Gilles Thomas
2. The intestinal labours of Paris – Sabine Barles and André Guillerme
3. Digesting in the long eighteenth century – Ian Miller
4. The soul in the entrails: the experience of the sick in the eighteenth century – Micheline Louis-Courvoisier

Part II: Excremental operations
5. Sawney’s seat: the social imaginary of the London bog-house c.1660–c.1800 – Mark Jenner
6. Eighteenth-century paper: the readers’ digest – Amélie Junqua
7. ‘Words have no smell’: faecal references in eighteenth-century Frenchthéâtre de société – Jennifer Ruimi
8. The legibility of the bowels: Lichtenberg’s excretory vision of Hogarth’sA Harlot’s Progress – Anthony Mahler

Part III: Burlesque bellies
9. Parodies of pompous knowledge: treatises on farting – Guilhem Armand
10. Potbelly, paunch and innards: variations on the abdomen in Marivaux’sL'Homère travesti andTélémaque travesti – Clémence Aznavour
11. Desire, disgust and indigestibility in John Cleland’sMemoirs of a Coxcomb – Rebecca Anne Barr
12. Rotund bellies and double chins: Hogarth’s bodies – Frédéric Ogée

Part IV: Visualising the viscera
13. Iconography of the belly: eighteenth-century satirical prints – Barbara Stentz
14. Visceral visions: art, pedagogy and politics in Revolutionary France – Dorothy Johnson
15. The saints of the entrails and the bowels of the earth – Jacques Gélis

Select bibliography
Index

This collection of essays addresses the belly and the bowels as key elements in our understanding of eighteenth-century mentalities, emotions, and perceptions of the self.