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Surveying the representation of odors in eighty British novels written in the 1860s, this study provides a new reading of Victorian values, particularly as they assess the relative merits of men and women, spirit, and matter. In depictions of comparative encounters, the commonplace meetings of everyday life, such fiction often registers the inequalities that distinguish one individual from another by marking one of them with a smell. In a surprisingly consistent fashion, these references constitute what cultural anthropologists call an osmology, a system of differentiations that reveal the status of the persons and things associated with specific odors. Featuring often innocuous and even potentially pleasing aromas emanating from food, flowers, and certain kinds of labor, novels of the 1860s array their characters into distinct categories, finding in some rather than in others olfactory proof of their materiality. Drawing upon the work of Victorian psychophysiologists and popular commentators on the senses, this study establishes the subtlety with which fictional representations distinguish between characters who give off odors and those who do not. By exploring the far-reaching implications of this osmology in specific novels by Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, Oliphant, Trollope, and Yonge, this study argues that the strikingly similar plots and characterizations typical of the 1860s, responding as they do to the economic and political concerns of the decade, reconfigure current understandings of the values typically attached to different classes and different genders in Victorian culture, specifically by presenting women as the bearers of materiality and genteel men as their insubstantial counterparts.

Scent is both an essential and seemingly impossible-to-recover aspect of material culture.Scent is one of our strongest ties to memory, yet to remember a smell without external stimuli is almost impossible for most people.

New to Beijing in the 1910s, actresses, especially opera stars and members of large all-female troupes, were active agents of theatrical innovation. Competing with actors in a rapidly commercializing theater business, certain privileged actresses developed a different repertoire and performance style for female roles by adapting regional opera traditions. As the characters they played onstage boldly sought the thrills of courtship and pursued their personal desires, these actresses fashioned a new flirtatious female subjectivity, different from that associated with heroines in the cult of qing in Ming literature, the sentimentalism of Butterfly fiction, and the May Fourth ideal of free love. However, as they assumed female roles that transgressed traditional expectations and catered to a male-dominated audience, actresses found their own commodification as sexual objects was inevitable.

A short story is presented.

[...] the novel's insistence on strong, foul smells as an aspect of past and future worlds rescripts what Walter Ong calls our \"sensorium\"-the sensory apparatus as an operational complex (28)-by privileging the olfactory sense rather than relegating it to primitive temporalities; foul odors jolt us into rethinking our assumptions about modernity and knowledge.1 Precisely because these smells disgust us, they perform what historian William Ian Miller explores as disgust's centrality to civilization's \"social control and psychic order\" (5). Some of the major world events that occurred or that I became aware of during the writing of Salt Fish Girl were the cloning of Dolly the sheep, the arrival of three rusty ships from China on the West Coast of British Columbia carrying around 600 Chinese migrant labourers, Monsanto's suing of a farmer whose canola crop, probably through natural pollination, had picked up some of Monsanto's altered DNA, the patenting of slightly modified basmati rice by a large Texas corporation, [and] the construction of Celebration, a fully planned ur-American town, by Disney.

A man is changed into a flea and must bring his future parents together in order to become human again. A woman convinces a river god to cure her sick son, but the remedy has mixed consequences. A young man must choose whether to be close to his wife's soul or body. And two deaf mutes transcend their physical existence in the garden of dreams. Strange and fantastical, these fairy tales of Béla Balázs (1884-1949), Hungarian writer, film critic, and famous librettist ofBluebeard's Castle, reflect his profound interest in friendship, alienation, and Taoist philosophy. Translated and introduced by Jack Zipes, one of the world's leading authorities on fairy tales,The Cloak of Dreamsbrings together sixteen of Balázs's unique and haunting stories. Written in 1921, these fairy tales were originally published with twenty images drawn in the Chinese style by painter Mariette Lydis, and this new edition includes a selection of Lydis's brilliant illustrations. Together, the tales and pictures accentuate the motifs and themes that run throughout Balázs's work: wandering protagonists, mysterious woods and mountains, solitude, and magical transformation. His fairy tales express our deepest desires and the hope that, even in the midst of tragedy, we can transcend our difficulties and forge our own destinies. Unusual, wondrous fairy tales that examine the world's cruelties and twists of fate,The Cloak of Dreamswill entertain, startle, and intrigue.

EVEN BEFORE ESTHER LYON enters the narrative of Felix Holt, she is introduced to the eponymous hero, whom she will eventually marry, through two smells — one present, the other absent; one highly conventional, the other distinctly unusual. As the narrator explains, Mr. Lyon’s sitting room contains “certain things” that are “incongruous” with its “general air” of “privation,” among them the “delicate scent of dried rose-leaves” and a wax candle. Lyon, embarrassed by what he takes to be Felix Holt’s unspoken criticism of such indulgence, explains to his visitor, “You are doubtless amazed to see me with a wax-light . . . but this undue luxury is paid for with the earnings of my daughter, who is so delicately framed that the smell of tallow is loathsome to her” (Eliot 53–54; ch. 5).1 Esther’s association with the scent of roses is quite unremarkable: it simply and quickly registers her as a wholly acceptable marriage partner. Lyon’s reference to the smell of tallow candles is, however, according to the practices of Victorian fiction, quite unconventional, first because it explicitly evokes a smell that is not there, the strong odor of candles made from animal fat; secondly, because it identifies a good smell or the relative lack of one, that of wax candles, with a negative moral judgment: Esther’s practice of spending her earnings on such candles is, to Lyon at least,