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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Literature and the Senses critically probes the role of literature in capturing and scrutinizing sensory perception. Organized around the five traditional senses, followed by a section on multisensoriality, the collection facilitates a dialogue between scholars working on literature written from the Middle Ages to the present day. The contributors engage with a variety of theorists from Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Michel Serres to Jean-Luc Nancy to foreground the distinctive means by which literary texts engage with, open up, or make uncertain dominant views of the nature of perception.
Considering the ways in which literary texts intersect with and diverge from scientific, epistemological, and philosophical perspectives, these essays explore a wide variety of literary moments of sensation including: the interspecies exchange of a look between a swan and a young Indigenous Australian girl; the sound of bees as captured in an early modern poem; the noxious smell of the 'Great Stink' that recurs in the Victorian novel; the taste of an eggplant registered in a poetic performance; tactile gestures in medieval romance; and the representation of a world in which the interdependence of human beings with the purple hibiscus plant is experienced through all five senses. The collection builds upon and breaks new ground in the field of sensory studies, focusing on what makes literature especially suitable to engaging with, contributing to, and challenging our perennial understandings of, the senses.
Contents
Sight
Stephanie Trigg: Looking at Faces: Geoffrey Chaucer, Hilary Mantel, and Alexis Wright
Zoë Lehmann Imfeld: Visualizing the Unseen in the Victorian Ghost Story
Sue Zemka: Descent, Spirit, Heart, Senses
Nuala Watt: Partial Sight, Dependency, and Open Poetic Form: A Creative Practice
Hearing
Corinne Saunders: 'A lowde voys clepyng': Voice-Hearing, Revelation, and Imagination
Simon Jackson: Attending to Sound in Early Modern Literature: Whythorne, Butler, and Bacon
Stacey McDowell: Acoustics, Echoes, and Whispering Galleries in Romantic Literature
Anne-Julia Zwierlein: The Roar on the Other Side of Silence: Sound, Hearing, and Social Change in Victorian Literature
Michael Davidson: A Poetics of Silence: Deafness, Poetics, and the Fate of the Senses
Smell
Holly Dugan: Festering Lilies: Seeing and Smelling Gender and Race in Renaissance Art and Poetry
Isabel Karremann: Bartholomew Fair's Olfactory Cross-Mappings: Smell, Place, Memory
Ursula Kluwick: A Sanitary Sense of Smell: Olfaction and Bodily Boundaries in Victorian Writing
Hsuan L. Hsu: Olfactory Futures in BIPOC Speculative Fiction
Taste
Mary C. Flannery: Reading 'Ful savourly': Taste and Good Taste in Later Medieval English Literature
Jamie C. Fumo: Tastelessness: Lack and Loss of Savour in the Medieval Poetic Imagination
Simon Smith: A Taste of 'Sweet Music': Writing (Through) the Senses in Early Modern England
Vanessa Guignery: Tasting with Words in Ben Okri's The Famished Road and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun
Zoë Skoulding: The Taste of Revolution
Touch
Hannah Piercy: Contact, Conduct, and Tactile Networks: Touch and its Social Functions in Middle English Verse Romance
Mark Amsler: Touch and the Sensible in the Play of Mary Magdalene
Abbie Garrington: Histories of the Human Hand: Huxley and Isherwood's Jacob's Hands and Modernist Manual Culture
Santanu Das: Touching Wounds: Violence and the Art of 'Feeling'
Multisensoriality
Richard G. Newhauser: Sensology and Enargeia
Sarah Stanbury: Bearing the Word: Speech Scrolls, Touch, and the Carthusian Miscellany
Mirja Lobnik: Multisensory Entanglements in Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus
Virginia Richter: Salt Taste of the Sea: The Multisensorial Beach in Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Charles Simmons's Salt Water
