Taste: A Literary HistoryWhat does eating have to do with aesthetic taste? While most accounts of aesthetic history avoid the gustatory aspects of taste, this book rewrites standard history to uncover the constitutive and dramatic tension between appetite and aesthetics at the heart of British literary tradition. From Milton through the Romantics, the metaphor of taste serves to mediate aesthetic judgment and consumerism, gusto and snobbery, gastronomes and gluttons, vampires and vegetarians, as well as the philosophy and physiology of food.The author advances a theory of taste based on Milton’s model of the human as consumer (and digester) of food, words, and other commodities—a consumer whose tasteful, subliminal self remains haunted by its own corporeality. Radically rereading Wordsworth’s feeding mind, Lamb’s gastronomical essays, Byron’s cannibals and other deviant diners, and Kantian nausea, Taste resituates Romanticism as a period that naturally saw the rise of the restaurant and the pleasures of the table as a cultural field for the practice of aesthetics. |
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Page 6
... find in meere Appetite to go , or move , no actuall Motion at all : but because some Motion they must acknowledge , they call it Metaphoricall Motion ; which is but an absurd speech : for though Words may be called metaphoricall ...
... find in meere Appetite to go , or move , no actuall Motion at all : but because some Motion they must acknowledge , they call it Metaphoricall Motion ; which is but an absurd speech : for though Words may be called metaphoricall ...
Page 9
... find for himself— but also social enjoyment for which the dinner must appear only as a vehicle ( AN 187 ) . In this Kantian vision of commensality , the social conventions of appetite bear a direct relation to aesthetics.29 The meal is ...
... find for himself— but also social enjoyment for which the dinner must appear only as a vehicle ( AN 187 ) . In this Kantian vision of commensality , the social conventions of appetite bear a direct relation to aesthetics.29 The meal is ...
Page 26
... find their being by partaking of God , " not only he by whom , but also he from whom , in whom , through whom , and on account of whom all things are " ( YP 6 : 302 ) . Chris- tianity is founded on sacrifice , which in a postlapsarian ...
... find their being by partaking of God , " not only he by whom , but also he from whom , in whom , through whom , and on account of whom all things are " ( YP 6 : 302 ) . Chris- tianity is founded on sacrifice , which in a postlapsarian ...
Page 30
... find , Milton's God shoots out his dregs ( one shudders even to mention it ) into the deep , Milton's cosmic latrine.26 Half a century ago , A. S. P. Woodhouse speculated ( in a footnote ) that this primordial purgation might be " a ...
... find , Milton's God shoots out his dregs ( one shudders even to mention it ) into the deep , Milton's cosmic latrine.26 Half a century ago , A. S. P. Woodhouse speculated ( in a footnote ) that this primordial purgation might be " a ...
Page 33
... find its being , through eating ; more precisely , a kind of symbolic eating that stops at the head , better known as taste . Raphael's description of angelic eating in Paradise Lost thus invests all meals - all eating whatsoever - with ...
... find its being , through eating ; more precisely , a kind of symbolic eating that stops at the head , better known as taste . Raphael's description of angelic eating in Paradise Lost thus invests all meals - all eating whatsoever - with ...
Contents
1 | |
22 | |
47 | |
4 Digesting Wordsworth | 68 |
5 Lambs LowUrban Taste | 88 |
Byron | 116 |
7 Keatss Nausea | 138 |
George IV | 160 |
Notes | 180 |
Index | 228 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic taste animal appetite arts beauty Bernard Mandeville bodily body bread British Burke Burke's Byron Cambridge cannibalism carnivorous century Charles Lamb civilizing Clarendon Press Coleridge connoisseur consumer consumerism critical critique culinary diet digestion dinner Don Juan dregs E. V. Lucas economy of consumption Edax eighteenth-century Elia England English Essay Fall of Hyperion feast feeding mind flesh flesh-eating French Freud gastronomical George Grimod gustatory gusto Harold Bloom human Hume hunger ideal James Gillray John Keats Keats's Lakes Lamb's letter London low-urban taste Mandeville Mandeville's meal Medusa metaphor middle-class Milton moral nature nineteenth-century object organ Oxford palate Paradise Lost Paradise Regained philosophical physiology pleasure poem poet poetic poetry political Prelude Roast Pig Romantic Romanticism Satan satire sense sexual Shaftesbury Shelley shipwreck smell Snowdon social society stomach sublime symbolic economy Thomas tion trans University Press vampire vegetarian vols William words Wordsworth writes York