This lively, accessible book is the first to explore Victorian
literature through scent and perfume, presenting an extensive range
of well-known and unfamiliar texts in intriguing and imaginative
new ways that make us re-think literature's relation with the
senses. Concentrating on aesthetic and decadent authors, Scents and
Sensibility introduces a rich selection of poems, essays, and
fiction, exploring these texts with reference to both the
little-known cultural history of perfume use and the appreciation
of natural fragrance in Victorian Britain. It shows how scent and
perfume are used to convey not merely moods and atmospheres but the
nuances of the aesthete or decadent's carefully cultivated
identity, personality, or sensibility. A key theme is the emergence
of the olfactif, the cultivated individual with a refined sense of
smell, influentially represented by the poet and critic Algernon
Charles Swinburne, who is emulated by a host of canonical and less
well-known aesthetic and decadent successors such as Walter Pater,
Edmund Gosse, John Addington Symonds, Lafcadio Hearn, Michael
Field, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Mark Andre Raffalovich, Theodore
Wratislaw, and A. Mary F. Robinson. This book explores how scent
and perfume pervade the work of these authors in many different
ways, signifying such diverse things as style, atmosphere,
influence, sexuality, sensibility, spirituality, refinement,
individuality, the expression of love and poetic creativity, and
the aura of personality, dandyism, modernity, and memory. A coda
explores the contrasting twentieth-century responses of Virginia
Woolf and Compton Mackenzie to the scent of Victorian literature.
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