Shelley’s Republic of Odours: Aesthetic and Political Dimensions of Scent in ‘The Sensitive-Plant’

Boyson, Rowan

doi:10.1179/0952414213z.00000000029

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Emily Friedman's monograph on smell in the 18th-century novel (2016) offers chapters on tobacco, the smelling bottle, the smell of other bodies, the new smell of sulphur (earthquakes, hot springs and industry), with a conclusion (along the lines of Corbin) arguing that scentless-ness, epitomized by Richardson's Clarissa, increasingly became valorized. Work on smell and Romantic poetry includes essays on Percy Shelley and William Wordsworth (Boyson, 2011(Boyson, , 2013. Before becoming prominent as an Object-Oriented-Ontology thinker, Timothy Morton attended to the atmospheric environment in his second monograph, The Poetics of Spice (2000), with a fascinating chapter on Keats's scented, sonorous atmospheres: 'The poetics of spice, then is an ambient poetics, not a rhetoric of disguise but an atmospherics ' (2000, p. 223).…”

Section: Atmosphere Phenomenology and The Sensesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Air and atmosphere studies: Enlightenment, phenomenology and ecocriticism

Boyson

2022

Literature Compass

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This essay examines the treatment of air and atmosphere in literary scholarship of the late 17th-to mid-19th-century periods, from the first, early Enlightenment discovery of the air's chemical structure and the coining of the word 'atmosphere', to the dawning of Victorian industrial pollution. As climate has become the predominant focus of environmental campaigning, and as air pollution and air infection have become near-universal concerns, the air itself has gained a corresponding increase in academic attention. Part I of my essay begins by sketching out the longer history of this interest, showing that air and atmosphere are complex words that have longstanding philosophical and literary histories alongside their everyday 'real' meanings. I explore the place of air studies in the History of Science, and look at how this discipline and English studies have enjoyed a close proximity with regards to the major chemical discoveries of the Enlightenment period. Part II defines the field of 'atmosphere studies' as it has emerged from 20th-century philosophy, and its importance to contemporary geography, anthropology and architecture. The complexity of the idea of 'atmosphere' is, however, rooted in early 19th-century aesthetics, and hence, I argue, literary scholarship of this period makes a crucial contribution to this broader atmospheric enquiry. Part III explores how literary critics and

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Section: Atmosphere Phenomenology and The Sensesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Air and atmosphere studies: Enlightenment, phenomenology and ecocriticism

Boyson

2022

Literature Compass

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“…72 This fits well with eighteenth-century medical and philosophical understandings of odour as the product of process and change in bodies. 73 The Macaroni was an 'evaporating subject'. His perfumes did the work of shattering 'subject-object oppositions'…”

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confidence: 99%

The Macaroni's ‘Ambrosial Essences’: Perfume, Identity and Public Space in Eighteenth‐Century England

Tullett¹

2014

J Eighteenth Century Stud

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The male antitype of the macaroni and the space of the pleasure gardens in which he reputedly existed have been primarily understood in terms of vision. This article seeks to re‐integrate other senses, particularly olfaction, into our understanding of these subjects. Sounds and smells, of individuals and urban spaces, undermined the idea of the pleasure garden as an enclosed space and the cultivation of the senses it attempted to encourage. The macaroni and his perfumes were an extreme example of this, linking the pleasure garden to the perfumer's shop and disrupting understandings of bodily comportment, masculinity and the proper use of the senses.

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Waste in the Nineteenth-Century Lyric

Moss

2023

European Romantic Review

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Shelley’s Republic of Odours: Aesthetic and Political Dimensions of Scent in ‘The Sensitive-Plant’

Cited by 3 publications

References 12 publications

Air and atmosphere studies: Enlightenment, phenomenology and ecocriticism

Air and atmosphere studies: Enlightenment, phenomenology and ecocriticism

The Macaroni's ‘Ambrosial Essences’: Perfume, Identity and Public Space in Eighteenth‐Century England

Waste in the Nineteenth-Century Lyric

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