The Routledge History of the Senses

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-34587-1
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 682 Seiten, Format (B × H): 175 mm x 250 mm, Gewicht: 1340 g

Reihe: Routledge Histories

The Routledge History of the Senses presents readers with an overview of the field. As well as pointing to directions for the future of the discipline, it illustrates the extent to which the subject offers a considerable space for the exploration of diverse historical topics through the lens of sensory experience.

The handbook brings together essays and case studies from some of the leading academics on the history of the senses. Together, they not only chart topics and arguments in existing scholarship but introduce fresh methodologies for future analyses. Specifically, the chapters collectively show that the senses of the historical body often portray the intensity of the invasion of capital upon the functions of the mind throughout global history. As a global history, this work arrives at a time when many sensory historians are looking for a touchstone for moving beyond the often heavily Western frameworks that dominate the existing literature on the historical senses.

Not only will this book appeal to students and scholars of the history of senses, visual studies, art history, food studies, and many of the social sciences, but individual chapters also offer useful reading material for a wide range of history modules and contemporary topics.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kettler, Andrew

Tullett, Will

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures

List of Contributors

Introduction: Radicalizing the Body, Haunting the Archive

Andrew Kettler

Section One – Historiography of the Western Senses

1) Sight: Trajan’s Column: A Site, a Sight, a Way of Seeing

A. Joan Saab

2) Sound: Of Bells, Gramophones, and… Empire? Approaches to the Sonic Past

Jared Asser

3) The Paradoxical Sense: The Role of Touch in History

Agalia Venters

4) Histories of Taste and Tasting History

Will Tullett

5) Smell: Re-odorizing History: A Historiography of Smell Studies

Katelynn Robinson

Section Two – Beyond the Five

6) Senselessness: The Politics of Unfeeling from Ancient Greece to the Present

Rob Boddice

7) Synaesthesia: The Sensory Landscapes of 1860-1920

Mira Stolpe Törneman

8) The Vibration Sense: Pallaesthesia, Sensory Substitution Design, and the Reformation of a Sixth Sense in the Early Twentieth Century

Clemens Finkelstein

9) A Sixth Sense

Renee Bricker and Carol Levin

Section Three – Perceptual Theories

10) Darsan and Sensory Immersion: Exploring Gaze in Hindu Religious Traditions

Sneha Haldar

11) Aesthetics as Aistethics: Transforming the Original Conception of Aesthetics as Sensory Episteme to Sensory Perception as Relation of Action, Knowing and Being

Jayanthan Sriram

12) A Most Thrilling Geometry (Predicative Space in Proust)

Tim Flanagan

13) Olfactive Paradigms of Air Quality: From the Great Stink to Odourless Particulates

Amin Hashemi

Section Four – Sensorial Othering

14) Medieval Race and the Senses: Sensing Race in Medieval Literature and Revisiting Richard Coer de Lyon

Annette Kern-Stähler and Hannah Piercy

15) Touching Off a Moral Panic: The Case of Lord O.

Bennett Gilbert

16) “A Touch of the Real Chinese Character”: Hearing Race in Nineteenth-Century British Descriptions of Chinese Music

Sam Cheney

17) ‘Thook Jihad’: Making Sense of Disgust and Spit in India

Heba Ahmed

Section Five – Consumption and Commodities

18) Consuming Scents of Place: Coconut Oil, Colonisation and the Changing Value of Sensory Commodities

Kate Stevens

19) Sensory Marketing: Engaging the Senses from Desire to Purchase

Curt Lund

20) From Coumarou to New-Mown-Hay. A Cultural History of Coumarin Across the Atlantic (17th-20th c.)

Manon Raffard

21) Living Made Easy: The Fashionable Flâneur’s Accessory for Avoiding City Stench, Miasma, Filth, “the Other,” and the Lower Classes

Kris Belden Adams

Section Six – Science, Medicine, and the Senses

22) Touch, Teaching and Controversy in the Work of Andreas Vesalius

Allen Shotwell

23) Knowing and Healing through the Senses: The Teaching of Medicine at the Universities of Coimbra and Salamanca (XVIII-XIX)

Carlos Alves

24) Taking the Pulse between Early Modern China and Europe: The Drifting Touch

Yijie Huang

25) Uncovering Annihilation in Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Asylum 1943-44

Maia Nichols

Section Seven – Sensory Media

26) Stroking Followed by Smashing: The Transformation of Touch from Tender to Violent in the Iconoclasm of the Reformation

Nausikaä El-Mecky

27) ‘The most bizarre invention of our century’. Imagining the Phonograph in Polish Press in 1877–1879

Marta Michalska

28) Stepping Outside the Cinema and into the Cinematic: Theatre Songs and Azaan in Kerala

Shahal Bilavin

29) Interfacing Optic Visuality, Erotic Sensoriality and Haptic Spatiality in Richa Kaul Padte’s Cyber Sexy: Rethinking Pornography

Abishek Ghosal

Section Eight – Military, Government, and Diplomacy

30) The Senses in the Conquest and Colonisation of Spanish America

Mary Katherine Newman

31) Extreme Sensations: The Sensory Experience of War in North America (1754–1760) Clément Monseigne

32) The Great Exodus of 1971: Towards Sensing the Liminality of Bengal Borderlands through Aesthetic Registers

Sushrita Acharjee

33) Sensory Borderlands

Chris Blakley

Conclusion: Sensation and Speed: The Death of the Historical Body

Andrew Kettler

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Andrew Kettler taught as an Assistant Professor and Early American History Fellow at the University of Toronto from 2017 to 2019 before serving as an Ahmanson-Getty Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles during the 2019-2020 academic year. He currently teaches at the University of South Carolina- Palmetto College. His monograph, The Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (2020), focuses on the development of racist semantics concerning miasma and the contrasting expansion of aromatic consciousness in the making of subaltern resistance to racialized olfactory discourses of state, religious, and slave masters.

Will Tullett is a Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of York. He has published two books on the history of smell - Smell in Eighteenth Century England (2019) and Smell and the Past (2023) - and many articles on sensory history. He was recently part of Odeuropa, a major EU-funded project on smell and heritage in Europe from the 1600s to the 1920s.