From Banks's brewery's yeasty stink to groaty pudding to spicy curry, Sebastian Groes and R. M. Francis have assembled a new literary history of the smells and (childhood) memories that belong to the Black Country. This often overlooked region of the United Kingdom at the frontlines of post-industrial upheaval is a veritable treasure trove for studying the relationship between olfaction and place-specific memory.
Smell, Memory, and Literature in the Black Country is an interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between smell and memory in which the contributions consider both personal and communal memory. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, memory studies, literary studies and philosophy, the critical essays reconsider psychogeography through cutting-edge sensory and philosophical engagements with physical space, smell, language and human behaviour. The creative contributions from writers including Liz Berry, Narinder Dhami, Anthony Cartwright, and Kerry Hadley-Pryce meditate on the senses, place, and identity. Not only does this book illustrate the rich cultural heritage of the Black Country, it will also appeal to those interested in place writing. The book is prefaced by Will Self.
Sebastian Groes is Professor of English Literature and Director of the Centre for Transnational and Transcultural Research at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. He is the author of The Making of London (Palgrave Macmillan 2011), and British Fiction in the Sixties (2016), and is the editor of Memory in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences (Palgrave Macmillan 2016).
R.M. Francis is Creative Writing Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. He is the author of five poetry pamphlets: Transitions (2015); Orpheus (2016); Corvus' Burnt-Wing Love Balm and Cure-all (2018); Lamella (2019); and Fieldnotes from a Deep Topography of Dudley (2019). His debut novel, Bella, was published in 2020 by Wild Pressed Books.
Title: Smell, Memory, and Literature in the Black Country
Author:
ISBN: 9783030572112
Binding:
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Publication Date: 2021-03-03
Number of Pages: 194
Weight: 0.3584 kg
The book will not only appeal to those interested in the rich cultural heritage of the Black Country, but also those interested in place-identity, politics and the importance of culture in the twenty-first century. (University of Wolverhampton, wlv.ac.uk, March 15, 2021)
The book and its findings would appeal to ' anyone interested in the Black Country and the importance of regional culture - and especially Black Country writing'. (Bev Holder, halesowennews.co.uk, March 11, 2021)