Literature and the Senses

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.

By probing the literary representation of sense perception across diverse periods and genres, the contributors to this volume attune us to the power of the written word to conjure worlds of sense. No sense is left unturned in this compendium, which also highlights the interactivity of the senses and the necessity of attending to the social formation of the sensorium or politics of the aesthetic - all of which makes for sensational reading. It is a harbinger of the sensorial revolution in contemporary literary scholarship.

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