The Senses in Literature, 1800 to 1920: Industry and Empire

This chapter will look at the role of the senses in literature across a diverse period, spanning Romantic, Victorian and Modernist literary formations. There are, nonetheless, significant continuities across this period, since all three formations react to the alteration of sensory experience by modernization and an increasingly self-­‐conscious imperialism. New conceptions of time and space, new sights, sounds, tastes and odours, and new tactile worlds, accompanied these developments, and were refracted, incorporated, and theorized in literary works.