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.

Rebecca Anne Barr is Lecturer above the bar at the National University of Ireland, Galway

Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon is Maître de conférences at Université Paris 8

Sophie Vasset is Maître de conférences at Université Paris-Diderot

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 French théâtre de société - Jennifer Ruimi
8. The legibility of the bowels: Lichtenberg's excretory vision of Hogarth's A 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's L'Homère travesti and Télémaque travesti - Clémence Aznavour
11. Desire, disgust and indigestibility in John Cleland's Memoirs 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