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Literature and the Senses

Online ISBN:
9780191926457
Print ISBN:
9780192843777
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Literature and the Senses

Annette Kern-Stähler (ed.),
Annette Kern-Stähler
(ed.)
Professor and Chair of Medieval English Studies, University of Bern
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Elizabeth Robertson (ed.)
Elizabeth Robertson
(ed.)
Professor Emerita and Honorary Research Fellow, University of Glasgow
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Published online:
24 August 2023
Published in print:
1 August 2023
Online ISBN:
9780191926457
Print ISBN:
9780192843777
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

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 aubergine 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.

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