Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Emily C. Friedman

2016
196 pages
ISBN 9781611487527
Transits

Scent is both an essential and seemingly impossible-to-recover aspect of material culture. Scent is one of our strongest ties to memory, yet to remember a smell without external stimuli is almost impossible for most people. Moreover, human beings' (specifically Western humans) ability to smell has been diminished through a process of increased emphasis on odor-removal, hygienic practices that emphasize de-odorization (rather than the covering of one odor by another). While other intangibles of the human experience have been placed into the context of the eighteenth-century novel, scent has so far remained largely sidelined in favor of discussions of the visual, the aural, touch, and taste.

Reading Smell provides models for how to incorporate olfactory knowledge into new readings of the literary form central to our understanding of the eighteenth century and modernity in general: the novel. The multiplication and development of the novel overlaps strikingly with changes in personal and private hygienic practices that would alter the culture's relationship to smell. Reading Smell includes wide-scale research and focused case studies of some of the most striking or prevalent uses of olfactory language in eighteenth-century British prose fiction. Highlighting scents with 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.

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Reviews

"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."
- The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, October 2017

"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."
- Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Fall 2020

"Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction offers an often amusing and generally informative probe into the varied scentscapes of the eighteenth century....[It] is broadly successful....Reading Smell achieves its aims, provides some surprising links and productive insights, and opens terrain for further inquiry into bodies and culture in the 1700s."
- The Scriblerian, Spring 2019

"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."
- Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, May 2018

About the author:

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

Distributed by Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

eBook: 9781611487534