Literature and the Senses

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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 eggplant 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.

Annette Kern-Stähler, Professor and Chair of Medieval English Studies, University of Bern,Elizabeth Robertson, Professor Emerita and Honorary Research Fellow, University of Glasgow

Annette Kern-Stähler is professor and chair of Medieval English Studies at the University of Bern. She was professeur invitée at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and honorary professor of English at the University of Kent at Canterbury and held fellowships at the Huntington Library and the Harry Ransom Centre. She studied at the Universities of York, Bonn, Oxford, and Münster. She has published widely on the senses in medieval literature, the uses of space, and post-war British-German relations. Among her most recent publications are two co-edited volumes: The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern England (2016), and Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval and Early Modern England (2019).

Elizabeth Robertson is Professor Emerita at the University of Glasgow. Her primary research interests are in gender and religion, literary form, the representation of the soul, and the senses in Middle English literature. Co-founder of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, she has published a monograph on the Ancrene Wisse and over fifty essays in journals and collections of essays including in Studies in the Age of Chaucer and Speculum. She is co-principal investigator of the interdisciplinary project 'The Senses: Past and Present' (with Annette Kern-Stähler and Fiona Macpherson). She has just completed a monograph Chaucerian Consent: Women, Religion and Subjection in Late Medieval England.

Sight
Looking at Faces: Geoffrey Chaucer, Hilary Mantel, and Alexis Wright, Stephanie Trigg
Visualizing the Unseen in the Victorian Ghost Story, Zoë Lehmann Imfeld
Descent, Spirit, Heart, Senses, Sue Zemka
Partial Sight, Dependency, and Open Poetic Form: A Creative Practice, Nuala Watt
Hearing
'A lowde voys clepyng': Voice-Hearing, Revelation, and Imagination, Corinne Saunders
Attending to Sound in Early Modern Literature: Whythorne, Butler, and Bacon, Simon Jackson
Acoustics, Echoes, and Whispering Galleries in Romantic Literature, Stacey McDowell
The Roar on the Other Side of Silence: Sound, Hearing, and Social Change in Victorian Literature, Anne-Julia Zwierlein
A Poetics of Silence: Deafness, Poetics, and the Fate of the Senses, Michael Davidson
Smell
Festering Lilies: Seeing and Smelling Gender and Race in Renaissance Art and Poetry, Holly Dugan
Bartholomew Fair's Olfactory Cross-Mappings: Smell, Place, Memory, Isabel Karremann
A Sanitary Sense of Smell: Olfaction and Bodily Boundaries in Victorian Writing, Ursula Kluwick
Olfactory Futures in BIPOC Speculative Fiction, Hsuan L. Hsu
Taste
Reading 'Ful savourly': Taste and Good Taste in Later Medieval English Literature, Mary C. Flannery
Tastelessness: Lack and Loss of Savour in the Medieval Poetic Imagination, Jamie C. Fumo
A Taste of 'Sweet Music': Writing (Through) the Senses in Early Modern England, Simon Smith
Tasting with Words in Ben Okri's The Famished Road and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun, Vanessa Guignery
The Taste of Revolution, Zoë Skoulding
Touch
Contact, Conduct, and Tactile Networks: Touch and its Social Functions in Middle English Verse Romance, Hannah Piercy
Touch and the Sensible in the Play of Mary Magdalene, Mark Amsler
Histories of the Human Hand: Huxley and Isherwood's Jacob's Hands and Modernist Manual Culture, Abbie Garrington
Touching Wounds: Violence and the Art of 'Feeling', Santau Das
Multisensoriality
Sensology and Enargeia, Richard G. Newhauser
Bearing the Word: Speech Scrolls, Touch, and the Carthusian Miscellany, Sarah Stanbury
Multisensory Entanglements in Edwidge Danticat's Claire of the Sea Light and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, Mirja Lobnik
Salt Taste of the Sea: The Multisensorial Beach in Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Charles Simmons's Salt Water, Virginia Richter