Science
“For by the word Nose, throughout all this long chapter of noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs,- - I declare, by that word I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less.” No reader of Laurence Sterne’s wildly-popular novel Tristram Shandy (1759-67) could be in doubt that sometimes a nose is not just a nose. In this lecture, Dr Noelle Gallagher explores the weird and wonderful cultural life of deformed noses in eighteenth-century British literature and art. Considering popular engravings and well-known literary works, Gallagher explores how the deformed nose came to function as a powerful symbol for fears about immigration, class instability and even the degeneration of the species. Speaker: Dr Noelle Gallagher, Senior Lecturer in 18th Century British Literature, University of Manchester