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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 19th century
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Common Scents - Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R2,408
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Common Scents - Comparative Encounters in High-Victorian Fiction (Hardcover, New)
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Who smells? Surveying nearly eighty novels written in the 1860s to
answer that impolite question, Common Scents provides a new reading
of Victorian values, particularly as they assess the relative
merits of men and women, spirit and matter. In depictions of
comparative encounters, the commonplace meetings of everyday life,
such fiction often registers the inequalities that distinguish one
individual from another by marking one of them with a smell. In a
surprisingly consistent fashion, these references constitute what
cultural anthropologists call an osmology, a system of
differentiations that reveals the status within a particular
culture of the persons and things associated with specific odors.
Featuring often innocuous and even potentially pleasing aromas
emanating from food, flowers, and certain kinds of labor, novels of
the 1860s array their characters into distinct categories, finding
in some rather than others olfactory proof of their materiality.
Central to this osmology is the difference between characters who
give off odors and those who do not, and this study draws upon the
work of Victorian psychophysiologists and popular commentators on
the senses to establish the subtlety with which fictional
representations make that distinction. By exploring the
far-reaching implications of this osmology in specific novels by
Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, Oliphant, Trollope, and Yonge, Common
Scents argues that the strikingly similar plots and
characterizations typical of the 1860s, responding as they do to
the economic and political concerns of the decade, reconfigure
conventional understandings of the relations between men and women.
Determining who smells reveals what Victorian culture at its
epitome takes for granted as a deeply embedded common sense, the
recognition of whose self-evident truth seems to be as instinctive
and automatic as a response to an odor.
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