Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-68448-480-5
Verlag: Bucknell University Press

Buch, Englisch, 228 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 150 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 299 g

Reihe: Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture, 1650-1850

Scent is one of our strongest ties to memory. Scent is also both an essential and seemingly impossible-to-recover aspect of material cultural. While other intangibles of the human experience have been examined in the context of the eighteenth-century novel, scent has so far remained largely sidelined in favor of the visual, the aural, touch, and taste. Incorporating wide-scale research and focused case studies from among the most striking or prevalent uses of olfactory language in eighteenth-century British prose fiction, Friedman examines how the recovery of forgotten or overlooked sensory information might reshape our understanding of these texts. By highlighting scents and their shifting meanings across the period—bodies, tobacco, smelling-bottles, and sulfur—Reading Smell not only provides new insights into canonical works by authors like Swift, Smollett, Richardson, Burney, Austen, and Lewis, but also sheds new light on the history of the British novel as a whole.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Ghost of a Perfume, the Challenge
of Recovery

1. Clouds of Smoke, Huffs of Snuff: The Smells of Tobacco

2. Running to the Smelling-Bottle

3. The Smell of Other People

4. The Age of Sulfur

Conclusion: The Great Unscenting

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author