Catherine Maxwell

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 Andre 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.

Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture

Scents and Sensibility

Patricia Pulham

Focusing on the work of the aesthete and intellectual Vernon Lee, this collection offers a wide range of critical writings that reflect the diversity of Lee's own interests. Organized in a broadly chronological order these essays examine key pieces in Lee's oeuvre, offering original approaches to a number of Lee's works including Euphorion, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories, Prince Albert and the Lady Snake, Louis Norbert, The Ballet of the Nations, The Handling of Words, and Music and Its Lovers. The book will also shed new light on Lee's relationship with contemporaries such as her brother, the poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton, her friend and mentor Walter Pater, and the art historian and fellow intellectual Bernard Berenson.

Decadence, Ethics, Aesthetics

Vernon Lee

This challenging and important study, which examines a range of canonical and less well-known writers, is an innovative reassessment of late Victorian literature in its relation to visionary Romanticism. It examines six late Victorian writers - Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy - to reveal their commitment to a Romantic visionary tradition which surface towards the end of the nineteenth century in response to the threat of growing materialism. Offering detailed and imaginative readings of both poetry and prose, Second Sight shows the different ways in which late Victorian writers move beyond materiality, without losing a commitment to it, to explore the mysterious relation between the seen and the unseen. A major re-evaluation of the post-Romantic visionary imagination, with implications for our understanding of literary modernism, Second Sight will be required reading for scholars interested in the literature of the late Victorian period.

The visionary imagination in late Victorian literature

Second sight

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.

Professor of Victorian Literature Catherine Maxwell

"The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne examines the feminisation of the post-Miltonic male poet, not through cultural history, but through a series of mythic or classical figures which include Philomela, Orpheus and Sappho. It recovers a disfiguring sublime imagined as an aggressive female force which feminises the male poet in an act that simultaneously deprives and energises him. This imaginative revisionist study suggests a new interpretative framework for Victorian men's poetry, while providing detailed and extensive re-readings of many major poems The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne will be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the English poetic tradition and Victorian poetry."--BOOK JACKET.

Bearing Blindness

The Female Sublime from Milton to Swinburne

Stefano Evangelista

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909), dramatist, novelist and critic, was late Victorian England’s unofficial Poet Laureate. Swinburne was admired by his contemporaries for his technical brilliance, his facility with classical and medieval forms, and his courage in expressing his sensual, erotic imagination. He was one of the most important Victorian poets, the founding figure for British aestheticism, and the dominant influence for fin-de-siècle and many modernist poets. This collection of eleven new essays by leading international scholars offers a thorough revaluation of this fascinating and complex figure. It situates him in the light of current critical work on cosmopolitanism, politics, form, Victorian Hellenism, gender and sexuality, the arts, and aestheticism and its contested relation to literary modernism. The essays in this collection reassess Swinburne’s work and reconstruct his vital and often provocative contribution to the Victorian cultural debate.

Catherine Maxwell

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