With groundbreaking contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Oliver Sacks, Italo Calvino and Alain Corbin, among others, Empire of the Senses overturns linguistic and textual models of interpretation and places sensory experience at the forefront of cultural analysis. The senses are gateways of knowledge, instruments of power, sources of pleasure and pain - and they are subject to dramatically different constructions in different societies and periods. Empire of the Senses charts the new terrains opened up by the sensual revolution in scholarship, as it takes the reader into the sensory worlds of the medieval witch and the postmodern mall, a Japanese tea ceremony and a Boston shelter for the homeless. This compelling revisioning of history and cultural studies sparkles with wit and insight and is destined to become a landmark in the field.

'This is one of the richest collections of essays that I have read in years...It is essential reading.' Edmund De Waal, 'Crafts' 'This is a timely collection that fills an important gap in our archive of the body. Readers and students across many disciplines will find it useful in making sense of a rapidly growing field of knowledge.' Veit Erlmann, Endowed Chair of Music,School of Music, University of Texas at Austin 'I have long been waiting for a book, and a book series, such as this exploring in depth the manifold sensuous dimensions of human experience from an interdisciplinary perspective.' Christopher Tilley, Professor of Anthropology, University College London 'David Howes has compiled an impressive volume of old and new contributions from a range of disciplines that form a solid basis for further work in the field of sensous scholarship.' Jo Tacchi, Queensland University of Technology, in 'International Journal of Cultural Studies' "Empire of the Senses' is

David Howes is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal. He is the author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory and a co-author of Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell.