The Power of Smell in American Literature

Table Of Contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• About the author
• About the book
• This eBook can be cited
• List of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I
• 1 Odor and Order: Theoretical Frameworks
• 1.1 ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them?’ The Concepts of Otherness and Hybridity
• 1.2 ‘The Others’ Other:’ Intersectionality Theory
• 1.3 Affect Theory
• 1.4 Abject Theory
• 1.5 Smell: Facets and Features
• Part II
• 2 Uniting and Dividing Scents: Early Western Smell Conceptions and Stereotypes
• 2.1 Antiquity and Social Smells: A Hierarchy of the Senses
• 2.2 The Devaluation of Smell vs. the ‘Odor of Sanctity:’ Early Christianity
• 2.3 Pure Aromas and Puritan Literature
• 2.4 Vulgar and Sarcastic Stenches in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
• 2.5 ‘Olfactory Revolutions:’ The Increasing Fear of the ‘Odor of the Other’
• 3 The ‘Odor of Race:’ Abjection and Subversion in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Slave Narratives
• 3.1 The ‘Black Smell Stereotype’
• 3.2 Subversive Re-Writes and Cunning Counter-Discourses: Selected Slave Narratives
• 3.3 Sniffing Out Blackness
• 4 From the Depreciation of Smell to Its Subversive Embrace: Transcendentalism and the American Renaissance
• 4.1 Scent and Transcendence: Odor Allusions in Transcendentalism
• 4.2 The Odor of Poverty and the Concept of the Individual
• 4.3 The Sensory-Corporeal and the Unfathomable-Transcendental: Melville’s and Whitman’s References to Smell
• 4.3.1 Fragrant Spermaceti: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
• 4.3.2 “Wafted with the Odor of His Body or Breath:” Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
• 4.4 The Cultural Devalorization of Odor: Louis Pasteur’s Germ Theory of Disease
• 5 Olfactory Realities: Smell Representations in Selected Texts from the Civil War to World War I
• 5.1 The Odor of the Real: The Sense of Smell in Realism
• 5.2 The Motif of Smell and Its Socio-Critical Impetus: Realism’s Olfactory Silence vs. Naturalism’s ‘Smelly’ Critique
• 5.2.1 Social Rank, Rank Odors: Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron-Mills
• 5.2.2 Overpowering Odors: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle
• 5.3 Scents Classed and Gendered: Regionalism and the Motif of Smell in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s Short Fiction
• 6 Form, Liminality, and Destabilization: The Motif of Smell in Exemplary Modernist Texts
• 6.1 “Smelling the Woman Smelling the Negro All at Once:” William Faulkner’s Light in August
• 6.1.1 Faulkner’s South and White Hegemonic Masculinity
• 6.1.2 A ‘Pinkwomansmelling Obscurity:’ Smell and Gender
• 6.1.3 Smell and Racial Otherness: Blackness, Whiteness, and ‘Inbetween-ness’
• 6.1.4 Smelling the Black Female: Intersectionality
• 6.1.5 Ambiguity Remains
• 6.2 “Like the Smell of Modern Progress:” Social Stench and Sexual Scents in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn
• 6.2.1 The American Horror
• 6.2.2 “Murder the World in Order to Save It:” The Healing Potential of Death and Destruction
• 6.2.3 Whiteness and the Stink of Immaculacy
• 6.2.4 The Odor of Naturalness vs. the Smell of Modern Progress
• 6.3 “You Could Smell His Skin Burning:” White Terror in Ralph Ellison’s “A Party Down at the Square”
• 7 ‘Unreal Realities:’ Smell in Postmodern/Postcolonial Trauma Narratives
• 7.1 Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, and Smell
• 7.2 Trauma
• 7.3 Trauma, Postmodernism/Postcolonialism, and Smell
• 7.4 Magical Realism, Trauma, and Smell
• 7.5 Smelling Doom: Magical Aromas in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
• 7.5.1 Rememories and the Representation of Traumatic Return
• 7.5.2 Representing Felt Reality in the Context of Trauma: Magical Realist Foreshadowings
• 7.5.3 The Power of Affect and the Reclamation of the Black Body
• 7.6 “You Can Run But You Can’t Hide:” John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire
• 7.6.1 “This Funk Is Mine:” Subversive Funkiness
• 7.6.2 City Miasmas and the Affective Presence of the Past
• 7.6.3 The Transgressiveness of Smell
• Part III
• 8 Sensory Entanglements: Smell and Synesthesia
• 8.1 Directionality, Accessibility, and Elusiveness: The Sense of Smell in Synesthesia
• 8.2 Linguistic Representations of Smell through Synesthesia: Transfers onto Smell
• 9 The ‘Olfactory-Verbal Gap:’ Literary Strategies to Describe Aromas
• Conclusion
• Works Cited