Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Authors

Emily C. Friedman

Files

Publication Date

6-16-2023

Description

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.

Keywords

Swift, Smollett, Richardson, Burney, Austen, Lewis, Scent, Stench, Smell, snuff taker, snuff-taking, snuff, smelling bottles, sulfur, tobacco, perfume, pomander, salts, vinaigrette, Body odor, Spas, Spa towns, British novel

Rights

Copyright © 2016 by Emily C. Friedman All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Language

eng

ISBN

9781684484805