Papers presented at a conference held in London in 2018. Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-271) and index.
Contents:
Introduction / Tag Gronberg. Scents of the mother / recent scientific findings / Barry C. Smith -- The smell of disgust : modernism and the social politics of olfaction / Michel Delville -- Stereotyped scents and "elegant reality" in Edmond de Goncourt's Chérie / Maria Weilandt -- "Follow the scent: one will seldom err" : the stench of failed Nietzschean practice in André Gide's The Immoralist (1902) and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice (1912) / Frank Krause -- Lemon trees, vile odours and no smells at all : olfaction in Elizabeth Bowen's, George Orwell's, and Arnold Bennett's hotels / Susanne Schmid -- "We are beginning to suffer indigestion from the flowers of innocence" : the subversion of floral fragrance in French literature of the end of the nineteenth century / Sophie-Valentine Borloz -- "European noses [...] have never smelt anything like it" : satirical scents in Paul Scheerbart's Decadent Orient / Katharina Herold -- Literary halitosis : bad breath and Odol in German literature around 1900 / Sergej Rickenbacher -- James Joyce and the legibility of odour (or, towards a scratch 'n' sniff Ulysses) / Jon Day -- "Bringing the perfume out of everything" : Vernon Lee, scent, and memory / Catherine Maxwell -- A good eye, taste and flair : the sensory skills of the fin-de-siècle collector / Érika Wicky -- "Dada smells like nothing" : sniffing out the Dada corpus / Andreas Kramer -- Scents of the mother / Tag Gronberg.
Summary:
Literary references to smell in social contexts have a long tradition. However, the significant contribution of odour imagery to our moods and emotions goes largely unnoticed, which accounts for the comparatively late attention paid to smell in research into the significance of sensory images in literature. The wellknown capacity of smell motifs to affirm and disrupt social and aesthetic norms cuts across historical periods, but the ways in which specific literary-historical periods renew motifs of smell in social life have remained underexplored. This volume, based on the interdisciplinary conference that took place in November 2018 at the University of London's Institute of Modern Languages Research, gives an overview of such innovations in English, French and German literature during the timespan between the 'olfactory explosion' in 1880 and the break-up of modern movements in 1939.
Series:
Publications of the Institute of Germanic Studies ; Bd. 103 London German studies ; XVII
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