Smell and Social Life. Aspects of English, French and German Literature (1880-1939)

Literary references to smell in social contexts have a long tradition. However, the significant contribution of odour imagery to our moods and emotions goes largely unnoticed, which accounts for the comparatively late attention paid to smell in research into the significance of sensory images in literature. The wellknown capacity of smell motifs to affirm and disrupt social and aesthetic norms cuts across historical periods, but the ways in which specific literary-historical periods renew motifs of smell in social life have remained underexplored. This volume, based on the interdisciplinary conference that took place in November 2018 at the University of London’s Institute of Modern Languages Research, gives an overview of such innovations in English, French and German literature during the timespan between the ‘olfactory explosion’ in 1880 and the break-up of modern movements in 1939.