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E-book Smell and the Past : Noses, Archives, Narratives

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Penilaian

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What if we were actually able to smell out the mixture of things that composed the olfactory past? What if historians were to bury their noses in the past instead of merely resorting to ocular inspection?This short book provides some answers to these questions. It is an exploration of what it means to study smell in the past, smell and the past and the smell of the past.These are three quite distinct things.Smell in the past refers to the shifting smellscapes of past societies and how people understood, categorized and responded to odours. In other words, smell in the past refers to the social and cultural role of scents and their sensing. Disinterring smell in the past relies on close and careful readingof texts and images. This is the kind of approach characteristic of much of the work published by humanities scholars on the sensory past. It is deeply influenced by anthropology, one of the fields that has been at the forefront of sensory studies, and cultural history. This approach holds that smell is deeply cultural, and both contemporary and historical responses to odours have always been informed by perceptual lenses that have been specific to a period, place or community. For instance, whilst Renaissance writers emphasized the scent of the rose and gave it great symbolic importance, shifting modes of perception in the nineteenth century led gardeners breeding roses to select for visual beauty rather than fragrance.2 Excavating these lenses involves an attunement to textual evidence and a recognition that smells – and noses – are in the past, historians are in the present, and that the gulf of historical distance means the two cannot (or indeed should not) meet.3 This historical distance, which has long been a mythic feature of the way historians define themselves, is also what frustrates Pendrel and leads him to fantasize about a more immediate way of accessing past experience (a fantasy that comes true when he time-travels back to 1820s London).

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

901 TUL s

Penerbit

London : Bloomsbury Academic., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

161 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781350367548

Klasifikasi

901

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Philosopy and Theory of History

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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