Table of Contents

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About the Author

Janice Carlisle is Professor of English at Tulane University.

Reviews

"Dickensians will want to know that there is a fascinating final chapter that concentrates on Our Mutual Friend.... Like all the readings in Common Scents, this is lucid and sophisticated.... Carlisle's groundbreaking book has the added attraction of being beautifully written.... Dickens scholars would do well to consult this fascinating and thought-provoking study, which abounds in original insights."--Dickens Quarterly
"Important for [its] interest in how the senses register modernity, and for the broader social implications of the ways in which the outside world penetrates the bodily sensorium;...whether the nose smells the proximity of the poor or the odor that belongs to the habits of another--and often threateningly social ascendant--class."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
"What Carlisle details is a fascinating subject: just how human exchanges can be prescribed by olfaction and how odors consequently define encounters between literary characters.... This detailing produces a provocative book about the Victorian novel and a pioneering study of Victorian scent."--Victorian Literature and Culture
"Important for [its] interest in how the senses register modernity, and for the broader social implications of the ways in which the outside world penetrates the bodily sensorium;...whether the nose smells the proximity of the poor or the odor that belongs to the habits of another--and often threateningly social ascendant--class."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
"Dickensians will want to know that there is a fascinating final chapter that concentrates on Our Mutual Friend.... Like all the readings in Common Scents, this is lucid and sophisticated.... Carlisle's groundbreaking book has the added attraction of being beautifully written.... Dickens scholars would do well to consult this fascinating and thought-provoking study, which abounds in original insights."--Dickens Quarterly
"What Carlisle details is a fascinating subject: just how human exchanges can be prescribed by olfaction and how odors consequently define encounters between literary characters.... This detailing produces a provocative book about the Victorian novel and a pioneering study of Victorian scent."--Victorian Literature and Culture
"Janice Carlisle's lucid and illuminating study reveals the importance of smell to human encounters in mid-century fiction, and opens up our understanding of how class differences and allegiances operate at a subliminal level. Engagingly written and extensively researched, Common Scents will change how we read Victorian novels."--Kate Flint, Rutgers University
"Recuperating a material, sensory apprehension of inequality, Common Scents tracks the ways Victorian fiction marks exchanges between persons whose status is registered through odor. The original and provocative results challenge current understandings of gender, power, and class. A scintillating read!" --Robert L. Patten, Rice University
"Common Scents is a remarkable book about the prevailing moods of the Victorian 1860s, the decade of the Second Reform Bill. From her survey of eighty novels, Janice Carlisle weaves a clear, elegant, original narrative in which smells and smelling mediate status encounters and exchanges between fictional characters. At the center of her project stands the figure of the melancholic male, suffering from an unrecognized estrangement from the materiality
signified by the odors of lower-middle-class trades and the smells of food. Adapting the Freudian definition of melancholia to the economic context of the decade, Carlisle offers surprising and illuminating
readings of melancholic males and their female rescuers in major novels by Dickens and George Eliot." --Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Boston College