Who smells? Surveying nearly eighty novels written in the 1860s to answer that impolite question, Common Scents provides a new reading of Victorian values, particularly as they assess the relative merits of men and women, spirit and matter. In depictions of comparative encounters, the commonplace meetings of everyday life, such fiction often registers the inequalities that distinguish one individual from another by marking one of them with a smell. In a surprisingly consistent fashion, these references constitute what cultural anthropologists call an osmology, a system of differentiations that reveals the status within a particular culture of the persons and things associated with specific odors. Featuring often innocuous and even potentially pleasing aromas emanating from food, flowers, and certain kinds of labor, novels of the 1860s array their characters into distinct categories, finding in some rather than others olfactory proof of their materiality. Central to this osmology is the difference between characters who give off odors and those who do not, and this study draws upon the work of Victorian psychophysiologists and popular commentators on the senses to establish the subtlety with which fictional representations make that distinction. By exploring the far-reaching implications of this osmology in specific novels by Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, Oliphant, Trollope, and Yonge, Common Scents argues that the strikingly similar plots and characterizations typical of the 1860s, responding as they do to the economic and political concerns of the decade, reconfigure conventional understandings of the relations between men and women. Determining who smells reveals what Victorian culture at its epitome takes for granted as a deeply embedded common sense, the recognition of whose self-evident truth seems to be as instinctive and automatic as a response to an odor.

The sense of smell has long been the most neglected of the human senses in literature. Common Scents sets out to undo this forgetting of olfactory sense-making by tracing the appearance of odors in modern German and French poetry. Jonas Rosenbrück argues that smell's persistence undermines modernity's self-image as an ocular age and shows how scents index a veritable "revolution of the senses." Such a revolution, as a redistribution of the senses, would make the common and shared character of our existence in scented atmospheres perceptible. Bringing contemporary ecocritical interest in atmospheres, air, and the senses into dialogue with literary criticism, theories of modernity, and political philosophy, Common Scents provides novel interpretations of figures such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Bertolt Brecht. These readings demonstrate how all terrestrial life is interlinked in the aerial commons that escapes the privatizing grasp of what Karl Marx called the "sense of having." Reformulating Bruno Latour, Rosenbrück argues that we have never been deodorized. In attending to this fact, Common Scents reconfigures subjectivity, corporeality, and politics.

Practically written, well organized, and comprehensive in its approach, Common Scents: A Practical Guide to Aromatherapy provides the beginner and experienced aromatherapist with a solid foundation on which to build one's own knowledge of essential oils and their role in achieving great health. This valuable reference, reflecting Lorrie's knowledge and professionalism, provides information on what essential oils are, how they are used, how to effectively blend them, and how they can affect specific body systems. There is also an A-Z ailment listing, as well as corresponding reflexology charts.

Who smells? After surveying nearly eighty novels written in the 1860s to answer that impolite question, Common Scents explores the implications of such olfactory data in novels by Dickens, Eliot, Meredith, Oliphant, Trollope, and Yonge. In doing so, it offers a new understanding of the self-evident values of high-Victorian culture.

A sensory journey though time, interpreting social (and political) history through the scents used by people from the Ancient Egyptians to Coco Chanel.