Scents & sensibility : perfume in Victorian literary culture / Catherine Maxwell.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Maxwell, Catherine, 1962- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Perfumes in literature.

Perfumes--History.

Perfumes.

History.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

England--Social life and customs--19th century.

England.

Manners and customs.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

History.

Physical Description:

xviii, 361 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Other Title:

Scents and sensibility

Place of Publication:

Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2017.

Summary:

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 rethink 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 Symbols, Lafcadio Hearn, Michael Field, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Mark André 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 elements 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Top Notes: Victorian Perfume Contexts 16

2 Perfumed Melodies, Violet Memories: Scent and Remembrance in the Nineteenth Century 66

3 Les Fleurs du Mâle: Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater 85

4 Scent, the Body, and the Cosmopolitan Flaireur: John Addington Symonds and Lafcadio Hearn 135

5 Carnal Flowers, Charnel Flowers: Tuberose in Late Victorian Poetry 182

6 Michael Field's Fragrant Imagination 201

7 Dandies and Decadents: Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons 240

8 Victorian Drydown and Sillage: Virginia Woolf and Compton Mackenzie 283.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 323-347) and index.

ISBN:

9780198701750

0198701756

OCLC:

988298964