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.
Table of Content
Foreword: Will Self.- Introduction – Francis and Groes.- ‘Library’ – Liz Berry An original prose-poem.- ‘Kuli Koli’ An original poem.- Anthony Cartwright original short fiction.- Snidge Scrumpin: Mapping Smell and Memory in the Black Country experiment – Bas Groes and Tom Mercer.- Wendy Crickard An original poem.- Narinder Dhami original short fiction.- Kerry Hadley-Pryce Original short fiction.- Lee Armstrong An original poem.- ‘Olfaction in Black Country Language and Literature’, Esther Pickersgill.- R. M. Francis A series of sense-memory, Black Country poems.- Roy Mc Farlane An original poem.- The Future is Elsewhere: Black Country Writing in Context essay Paul Mc Donald on contemporary Black Country fiction.- Nathalie Burdett An original poem.- Emma Purshouse An original poem.- ‘Making Sense? The Black Country and its Futures’, Stuart Connor.- Niall Griffiths.- Brendan Hawthorne.- ‘The Rise of Black Countryness: Place-Identity and the Twenty-First Century West Midlands’ R. M. Francis.- Conclusion: The Future of the Black Country – Groes/Francis.About the author
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.
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