The Olfactory Aesthetic of Eighteenth-Century Writing

The experience of smell is renowned for its links to memory and emotion; but it is the most neglected of senses in literary and cultural history, perhaps due to its transience and supposed ineffability. This paper comes at the beginning of a project exploring the changing representations of smell in different genres of writing in the long eighteenth century, which attempts to explore the philosophical history of smell and its relation to metaphor. Examples will be drawn from Swift, Smollett and Shelley.