“Emily C. Friedman’s Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction presents a new way of reading 18th-century literature: nose first. Its four chapters explore the ways in which class, gender, and other social signals inhere in fictional representations of odors, aromas, and stenches, and the people who make, perceive, and avoid them. Friedman’s readings amply demonstrate the richness and diversity of the scent-based signals novelists employ to reveal their characters to us, and to one another.”
~The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer
“Emily C. Friedman presents an enormous wealth of information. The orderliness and care with which Friedman has gathered this immensely important body of evidence makes for a pleasurable read. This illuminating topic, so timely in its address to the importance of the senses and the role of material experience in literary historical writing, has been treated with great sensitivity. The range and depth of Friedman’s reading, and the context she has brought to bear, make the value of this material eminently clear.”
~Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, Eighteenth-Century Fiction
“Friedman has gathered a vast collection of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fictional texts. The stimulating methodological questions raised constitute one of the major strengths of the study. The book is also enriched by a substantive and comprehensive bibliography representing the field of olfactory studies in English. This study of the significance of smells in eighteenth-century English literature is an important advancement for smell studies, focusing on a corpus of texts rarely studied from this perspective.”
~Jean-Alexandre Perras, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies
“Reading Smell in Eighteenth-Century Fiction offers an often amusing and generally informative probe into the varied scentscapes of the eighteenth century ... [It] provides some surprising links and productive insights, and opens terrain for further inquiry into bodies and culture in the 1700s.”
~Alex Wetmore, The Scriblerian
