William Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes; eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division.

Our notion of the self depends on it; cultural identities have frequent recourse to its boundary-policing powers; and love depends on overcoming it. Miller traverses literature, philosophy, history, political theory, and psychology to show how disgust animates our world.

Your students and users will find biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers in this volume of Contemporary Authors®. Authors in this volume include: Patricia Choa Jacob Epstein Julie Kavanagh Sharon Thesen

"Disgust and Its Disorders: Theory, Assessment, and Treatment Implications thoughtfully examines the role of disgust in psychopathology by highlighting important theoretical and methodological developments and discussing recent research on behavioral patterns that can be provoked by disgust. Contributors demonstrate that disgust plays an important role in a wide range of psychopathology, including sexual dysfunction, eating disorders, animal phobias, and obsessive - compulsive disorder. Disgust is shown to be a multidimensional construct that centers on the unifying theme of potential contamination of the body, soul, and broad social order. Editors Bunmi O. Olatunji and Dean McKay thoroughly review the available research on disgust and shed light on how its interpretation will, in turn, facilitate the development of better treatment of disgust-related avoidance."--BOOK JACKET.

In these two essays, Kolnai (1905-1973, philosophy, Bedford College) distinguishes disgust from other emotions, such as fear, contempt, and hatred. He examines the range of physically disgusting items, observing that disgusting material is always biological. And he considers the macabre attraction of the disgusting, analyzing the relationship it embodies between life and death, and then considering the implications of this analysis for purely moral disgust. Annotation : 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).