Bøger i Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850 serien

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. The past decade has seen a great expansion of our understanding of how smell works physiologically, psychologically, and culturally, and there is no better moment than now to attempt to recover the traces of olfactory perceptions, descriptions, and assumptions. 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. This book examines how far the novel can be understood through a reintroduction of olfactory information. After decades of reading for all kinds of racial, cultural, gendered, and other sorts of absences back into the novel, this book takes one step further: to consider how the recovery of forgotten or overlooked olfactory assumptions might reshape our understanding of these texts. 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.

A Race of Female Patriots argues that public-spirited women proliferated on the eighteenth-century British stage to catalyze an affective experience of political belonging, as dramatists imagined new forms of affiliation, allegiance, and loyalty suitable to the new British constitution established bythe Glorious Revolution of 1688. Brett D. Wilson examines both staples of the repertory (The Fair Penitent, Jane Shore) and lesser-known plays (Liberty Asserted, The Revolution of Sweden, Edward and Eleonora) to define the parameters of a prevalent yet under-examined dramatic mode: ';civic' dramas that use scenes of political strife and private distress to stage the fashioning of communities around women. Onstage, women act to benefit the publiccrucially, Wilson argues, by infusing the commonwealth with sentimental ardor: public spirit. Playwrights like Nicholas Rowe, Catharine Trotter, John Dennis, and James Thomson make the female-centered unions they imagine into synecdoches for a British nation transformed from turmoil to harmony. Restoring to view key neglected texts that portray women who feel deeply as agents of inclusion and icons of civic virtue, A Race of Female Patriots is a persuasive study of tragic drama at a time of great political change that yields new insight into the relation between women, feeling, and the public sphere.

Explores representations of late seventeenth- to mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic women travellers. The volume highlights the resilience of women who ventured voluntarily and by force across the Atlantic - some seeking mobility, adventure, knowledge, wealth, and freedom, and others surviving subjugation, capture, and enslavement.

Explores representations of late seventeenth- to mid-nineteenth-century transatlantic women travellers. The volume highlights the resilience of women who ventured voluntarily and by force across the Atlantic - some seeking mobility, adventure, knowledge, wealth, and freedom, and others surviving subjugation, capture, and enslavement.

Brings together eleven scholars who suggest new and unfamiliar ways of thinking about this most familiar of works, and who ask us to consider the enduring appeal of 'Crusoe', more recognisable today than ever before.

Brings together eleven scholars who suggest new and unfamiliar ways of thinking about this most familiar of works, and who ask us to consider the enduring appeal of 'Crusoe', more recognisable today than ever before.

Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy continues to be as widely read and admired as upon its first appearance. This volume offers fresh perspectives on Sterne's novel that will appeal to students and critics alike.

Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy continues to be as widely read and admired as upon its first appearance. This volume offers fresh perspectives on Sterne's novel that will appeal to students and critics alike.

Recognising distance as a central concern of the Enlightenment, this volume offers eight essays on distance in art and literature; on cultural transmission and exchange over distance; and on distance as a topic in science, a theme in literature, and a central issue in modern research methods.

Recognising distance as a central concern of the Enlightenment, this volume offers eight essays on distance in art and literature; on cultural transmission and exchange over distance; and on distance as a topic in science, a theme in literature, and a central issue in modern research methods.

Unearths a performance history, on and off the stage, of Restoration libertine drama in Britain's eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Daniel Gustafson traces libertine drama's persistent appeal for writers and performers wrestling with the powers of the emergent liberal subject and the tensions of that subject with sovereign absolutism.

Explores death and its relics as they appear within the confines of the eighteenth-century British novel. The book argues that the cultural disappearance of the dead/dying body and the introduction of consciousness as humanity's newfound soul found expression in fictional representations of the relic (object) or relict (person).

Argues that Scottish poetry in the age of Burns reclaims not a single past, dominated and overwritten by the unitary national language of an elite ruling class, but a past that conceptualizes the Scottish nation in terms of local self-identification, linguistic multiplicity, cultural and religious difference, and transnational affiliations.

Traces the migration of tragicomedy, the comedy of manners, and melodrama from the stage to the novel, offering a dramatic new approach to the history of the English novel that examines how the collaboration of genres contributed to the novel's narrative form and to the modern organization of literature.

A fascinating portrait of a unique book, its context, and its author. Joseph Forsyth, travelling through an Italy plundered by Napoleon, was unjustly imprisoned in 1803 by the French as an enemy alien. Out of his arduous eleven-year "detention" came his only book, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts, and Letters during an Excursion in Italy.

Examines the significant role that disability plays in shaping the British literary history of sexuality. Jason Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain.

Offers a new understanding of Islam in eighteenth-century Britain. Samara Cahill explores two overlapping strands of thinking about women and Islam, which produce the phenomenon of "feminist orientalism".

Explores the transformative power of reading in the eighteenth century, and how this was expressed in the fascination with Don Quixote and in a proliferation of narratives about quixotic readers, readers who attempt to reproduce and embody their readings.

The poets discussed in Cultivating Peace imagine states of peace and war to be fundamentally and materially linked. In distinct ways, they dismantle the dream of the golden age renewed, proposing instead that peace must be sustained by constant labour.

Samuel Johnson's life was situated within a rich social and intellectual community of friendships and antagonisms. This book is a collection of ten essays that explores relationships between Johnson and several of his main contemporaries and analyses some of the literary productions emanating from the pressures within those relationships.

Examines Anglophone writers who repurposed William Wordsworth's poetry. By reading Wordsworth in dialogue with J. M. Coetzee, Lydia Maria Child, and Jamaica Kincaid, Katherine Bergren revitalizes our understanding of Wordsworth's career and its place in the canon.

Tells the troubled history of abolition and slave violence by examining representations of shipboard mutiny and insurrection in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Anglo-American and American literature. Fire on the Water centers on five black sailors, whose experiences either inspired or found resonance within fiction.