Coriolanus and the “Rank-Scented Meinie”: Smelling Rank in Early Modern London

Abstract

In “Dreaming of Infrastructures,” her introduction to the PMLA’s 2007 special issue on cities, Patricia Yaeger argues that it is time to redraw Raymond Williams’s influential map of urban and literary histories and to reexamine the ways in which labor relationships create “forms of living” and “structures of feeling.”1 New global crises of post- and overindustrialization in cities such as Baghdad, Harare, Aceh, Detroit, and New Orleans challenge Williams’s argument. Exponential and unpredictable population growth has made traditional, planned infrastructures impossible. How can literature provide a metaphorical structure through which to process the tension between economic conditions and individual experiences of them if new urban realities are defined by a profound lack of material infrastructure? Waste, rather than structure, overwhelms these landscapes. Reading the nameless, postindustrial metropolis in José Saramago’s Blindness as representative of such trends, Yaeger argues that the novel depicts “yet another city where it is impossible to move without bumping into other people’s bodily wastes.”2