Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France

Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France
Author: Cheryl Krueger
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2023-06-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1487546572

Despite long-standing assertions that languages, including French and English, cannot sufficiently communicate the experience of smell, much of France’s nineteenth-century literature has gained praise for its memorable evocation of odours. As French perfume was industrialized, democratized, cosmeticized, and feminized in the nineteenth century, stories of fragrant scent trails aligned perfume with toxic behaviour and viewed a woman’s scent as something alluring, but also something to be controlled. Drawing on a wealth of resources, Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France explores how fiction and related writing on olfaction meet, permeate, and illuminate one another. The book examines medical tracts, letters, manuscripts, posters, print advertisements, magazine articles, perfume manuals, etiquette books, interviews, and encounters with fragrant materials themselves. Cheryl Krueger explores how the olfactory language of a novel or poem conveys the distinctiveness of a text, its unique relationship to language, its style, and its ways of engaging the reader: its signature scent. Shedding light on the French perfume culture that we know today, Perfume on the Page in Nineteenth-Century France follows the scent trails that ultimately challenge us to read perfume and literature in new ways.

Common Scents

Common Scents
Author: Jonas Rosenbrück
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 359
Release: 2024-10-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1438499728

The sense of smell has long been the most neglected of the human senses in literature. Common Scents sets out to undo this forgetting of olfactory sense-making by tracing the appearance of odors in modern German and French poetry. Jonas Rosenbrück argues that smell's persistence undermines modernity's self-image as an ocular age and shows how scents index a veritable "revolution of the senses." Such a revolution, as a redistribution of the senses, would make the common and shared character of our existence in scented atmospheres perceptible. Bringing contemporary ecocritical interest in atmospheres, air, and the senses into dialogue with literary criticism, theories of modernity, and political philosophy, Common Scents provides novel interpretations of figures such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertolt Brecht. These readings demonstrate how all terrestrial life is interlinked in the aerial commons that escapes the privatizing grasp of what Karl Marx called the "sense of having." Reformulating Bruno Latour, Rosenbrück argues that we have never been deodorized. In attending to this fact, Common Scents reconfigures subjectivity, corporeality, and politics.

Petrarch and the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-century France

Petrarch and the Literary Culture of Nineteenth-century France
Author: Jennifer Rushworth
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2017
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1843844567

A consideration of Petrarch's influence on, and appearance in, French texts - and in particular, his appropriation by the Avignonese. Was Petrarch French? This book explores the various answers to that bold question offered by French readers and translators of Petrarch working in a period of less well-known but equally rich Petrarchism: the nineteenth century. It considers both translations and rewritings: the former comprise not only Petrarch's celebrated Italian poetry but also his often neglected Latin works; the latter explore Petrarch's influence on and presence in French novels aswell as poetry of the period, both in and out of the canon. Nineteenth-century French Petrarchism has its roots in the later part of the previous century, with formative contributions from Voltaire, Rousseau, and, in particular, the abbé de Sade. To these literary catalysts must be added the unification of Avignon with France at the Revolution, as well as anniversary commemorations of Petrarch's birth and death celebrated in Avignon and Fontaine-de-Vaucluse across the period (1804-1874-1904). Situated at the crossroads of reception history, medievalism, and translation studies, this investigation uncovers tensions between the competing construction of a national, French Petrarch and a local, Avignonese or Provençal poet. Taking Petrarch as its litmus test, this book also asks probing questions about the bases of nationality, identity, and belonging. Jennifer Rushworth is a Junior Research Fellowat St John's College, Oxford.

Scents and Sensibility

Scents and Sensibility
Author: Catherine Maxwell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2017-10-20
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0191005215

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 re-think 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 Symonds, 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 things 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.

Nineteenth-Century French Song

Nineteenth-Century French Song
Author: Barbara Meister
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 1998-04-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780253211750

"Song by song, this comprehensive study addresses each composer's complete works for solo voice and piano. When necessary, errors in popular published editions are pointed out and corrected. For each song, the full French text is given, followed by Barbara Meister's translation."--Page 4 of cover.

The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs

The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs
Author: David S. Barnes
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2006-06-06
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0801888735

The scientific and social history surrounding the 1880 incident of a foul odor in Paris and the development of public health culture that followed. Late in the summer of 1880, a wave of odors enveloped large portions of Paris. As the stench lingered, outraged residents feared that the foul air would breed an epidemic. Fifteen years later—when the City of Light was in the grips of another Great Stink—the public conversation about health and disease had changed dramatically. Parisians held their noses and protested, but this time few feared that the odors would spread disease. Historian David S. Barnes examines the birth of a new microbe-centered science of public health during the 1880s and 1890s, when the germ theory of disease burst into public consciousness. Tracing a series of developments in French science, medicine, politics, and culture, Barnes reveals how the science and practice of public health changed during the heyday of the Bacteriological Revolution. Despite its many innovations, however, the new science of germs did not entirely sweep away the older “sanitarian” view of public health. The longstanding conviction that disease could be traced to filthy people, places, and substances remained strong, even as it was translated into the language of bacteriology. Ultimately, the attitudes of physicians and the French public were shaped by political struggles between republicans and the clergy, by aggressive efforts to educate and “civilize” the peasantry, and by long-term shifts in the public’s ability to tolerate the odor of bodily substances. “A well-developed study in medically related social history, it tells an intriguing tale and prompts us to ask how our own cultural contexts affect our views and actions regarding environmental and infectious scourges here and now.” —New England Journal of Medicine “Both a captivating story and a sophisticated historical study. Kudos to Barnes for this valuable and insightful book that both physicians and historians will enjoy.” —Journal of the American Medical Association

Scented Visions

Scented Visions
Author: Christina Bradstreet
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2022-06-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0271092580

Smell loomed large in cultural discourse in the late nineteenth century, thanks to the midcentury fear of miasma, the drive for sanitation reform, and the rise in artificial perfumery. Meanwhile, the science of olfaction remained largely mysterious, prompting an impulse to “see smell” and inspiring some artists to picture scent in order to better know and control it. This book recovers the substantive role of the olfactory in Pre-Raphaelite art and Aestheticism. Christina Bradstreet examines the iconography and symbolism of scent in nineteenth-century art and visual culture. Fragrant imagery in the work of John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Simeon Solomon, George Frederic Watts, Edward Burne-Jones, and others set the trend for the preoccupation with scent that informed swaths of British, European, and American art and design. Bradstreet’s rich analyses of paintings, perfume posters, and other works of visual culture demonstrate how artworks mirrored the “period nose” and intersected with the most clamorous debates of the day, including evolution, civilization, race, urban morality, mental health, faith, and the “woman question.” Beautifully illustrated and grounded in current practices in sensory history, Scented Visions presents both fresh readings of major works of art and a deeper understanding of the cultural history of nineteenth-century scent.

The Oxford Handbook of Decadence

The Oxford Handbook of Decadence
Author: Jane Desmarais
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 745
Release: 2022
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0190066954

Edited by Jane Desmarais and David Weir.

Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945

Multicultural Writers from Antiquity to 1945
Author: Alba Amoia
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 508
Release: 2001-10-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0313016488

The final decades of the 20th century have seen an explosion of interest in multiculturalism. But multiculturalism is more than an awareness of the different cultures comprising contemporary societies. For centuries, people from around the world have come in contact with cultures other than their own, and their exposure to multiple cultures has fostered their creativity and ability to make lasting contributions to civilization. The effects of multiculturalism are especially apparent in literature, since writers tend to be particularly aware of their environments and record their experiences. This reference includes alphabetically arranged entries for more than 100 world writers from antiquity to 1945, who were significantly influenced by cultures other than their own. Included are entries for major canonical Ancient and Modern writers of the Western and Eastern worlds. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes a brief biography, a discussion of multicultural themes and contexts, a summary of the writer's critical reception, and primary and secondary bibliographies. By illuminating the shaping influence of multiculturalism on these writers, the volume points to the lasting value of multiculturalism in the contemporary world.