Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

New in paperback! 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.

Now available for the first time in paperback, Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction examines how far the novel can be understood through a reintroduction of olfactory information and considers how the recovery of forgotten or overlooked olfactory assumptions might reshape our understanding of canonical works by authors like Swift, Smollett, Richardson, Burney, Austen, and Lewis.

EMILY C. FRIEDMAN is an associate professor of English at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama.
 

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

“Emily C. Friedman’s Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction presents a new way of reading 18th-century literature: nose first. Its four chapters explore the ways in which class, gender, and other social signals inhere in fictional representations of odors, aromas, and stenches, and the people who make, perceive, and avoid them. Friedman’s readings amply demonstrate the richness and diversity of the scent-based signals novelists employ to reveal their characters to us, and to one another.”

“Emily C. Friedman presents an enormous wealth of information. The orderliness and care with which Friedman has gathered this immensely important body of evidence makes for a pleasurable read. This illuminating topic, so timely in its address to the importance of the senses and the role of material experience in literary historical writing, has been treated with great sensitivity. The range and depth of Friedman’s reading, and the context she has brought to bear, make the value of this material eminently clear.”

“Friedman has gathered a vast collection of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fictional texts. The stimulating methodological questions raised constitute one of the major strengths of the study. The book is also enriched by a substantive and comprehensive bibliography representing the field of olfactory studies in English. This study of the significance of smells in eighteenth-century English literature is an important advancement for smell studies, focusing on a corpus of texts rarely studied from this perspective.”

“Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction offers an often amusing and generally informative probe into the varied scentscapes of the eighteenth century … [It] provides some surprising links and productive insights, and opens terrain for further inquiry into bodies and culture in the 1700s.”