The Culture of Smells

What is it about?

focusing on olfaction in literary texts mainly from late imperial China, I intend to offer a contribution to understanding the cultural constructs of smell as well as its involvement in the worlds of body, mind and affect. The first section will present multifarious, rich, and contradictory aspects of olfaction in late imperial Chinese literature. The second section explores the main functions of olfaction registered in the sources, and the third section focuses on the polysemantic Chinese term xiang that has the basic meaning of both incense and perfume, but in some contexts can be interpreted as “beauty” and/or “love.”

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