Sensory Experiments

“With precision, writerly grace, and great analytic power, Erica Fretwell uses the backstory of psychophysics to map out the contradictory ways feeling subjects came to be thought in the nineteenth century. This is a uniquely strong book, anchored in exacting historical, theoretical, and exegetical scholarship. It stands to make a powerful intervention into nineteenth-century literary studies and especially into science studies, critical race studies, and biopolitical critique.” - Peter Coviello, author of Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism

“Historicizing the intersections among nineteenth-century conceptions of materiality, race, and aesthetic experience, Erica Fretwell produces a wide-reaching framework for understanding the stakes of sensory experience. The result is a rigorous historical approach to nineteenth-century science and culture that underscores efforts to ‘educate’ or ‘civilize’ the senses. This brilliant, original, and important book will make waves in race studies, sensory studies, American studies, the history of science, and American literature.” - Hsuan L. Hsu, author of Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain’s Asia and Comparative Racialization

“Sensory Experiments is an intensely researched and creative analysis that often maneuvers concepts from Raymond Williams, Michel Serres, Lauren Berlant, and Brian Massumi toward connections among sensory studies, the history of science, the history of emotions, and literary criticism."

“In her excellent Sensory Experiments, Erica Fretwell puts forward an insightful thesis informed by an intelligent selection of the literature and a rigorous multi-disciplinary analysis. . . . It should appeal . . . to any reader with an interest in the history of psychology, aesthetics, or U.S. culture in the post-Civil War period.” - Jorge Castro-Tejerina, Centaurus

“Fretwell hits a sweet spot between science and culture, offering a wide-ranging experimental archive on the aesthetic history of the US. Like any good archive, this work opens a view not only to the past but also forcefully into the future. Anyone interested in the aesthetic dimension of contemporary social life, regardless of its specific context, will benefit from reading the textual experiments Fretwell so deftly performs. Highly recommended.” - B. G. Chang, Choice

“[Sensory Experiments] is poised to make a significant and lasting intervention across fields. For scholars of sensory studies, affect theory, and American literature, it is deeply important reading.” - Jake McGinnis, Papers On Language & Literature

“Sensory Experiments points us not only to the ways in which senses served as a substrate for considerations of self and subjectivity for cultural producers in the nineteenth century; it also suggests that we be continually aware—and conscious of, and careful with—our own assessments of contemporary sense and sensation.” - Michael Rossi, The Senses and Society

“[Fretwell’s] writing is deeply satisfying and provocative. . . . Fretwell deftly navigates a shocking variety of source types and between the disciplines of literature studies, cultural and intellectual history, and sensory studies with ease. SensoryExperiments will be an important book for all of these fields and more.” - Alexandra Huis, Social History Of Medicine

"As we learn from Fretwell’s important study, psychophysics provided experimental methods, new regulatory techniques, and a revised discourse of aesthetics that helped to construct a conceptual framework for the study of consciousness and the remaking of subjectivity." - Premesh Lalu, History and Theory

"A magisterial take on the nineteenth-century science of the senses and the emergence of aesthetic perception as a mode of thinking and feeling. It is a remarkable study for how deftly it works across all five senses, and for its attunement to how sensory registers allow us to set side by side authors, figures, and texts we would not often imagine together." - J. Michelle Coghlan, American Literature