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 viii
... helped to raise our beautiful boy Julian Rovee during the first three years of his life, should go without saying but will not go unrecorded here. Abbreviations AN Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of viii Acknowledgments.
... helped to raise our beautiful boy Julian Rovee during the first three years of his life, should go without saying but will not go unrecorded here. Abbreviations AN Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of viii Acknowledgments.
Page 10
... first task of the host is to exercise social discrimination (a term now freighted with pejorative significance) in the selection of guests, and Kant's recommended number of guests is in line with that of contemporary conduct books ...
... first task of the host is to exercise social discrimination (a term now freighted with pejorative significance) in the selection of guests, and Kant's recommended number of guests is in line with that of contemporary conduct books ...
Page 12
... first rank among our organs.''∂≠ As subjectivity hinged on sensory experience, the physiology of taste came to play a central role in determining human identity. According to Coleridge, the ''lower'' faculties, such as the ...
... first rank among our organs.''∂≠ As subjectivity hinged on sensory experience, the physiology of taste came to play a central role in determining human identity. According to Coleridge, the ''lower'' faculties, such as the ...
Page 16
... first used as a metaphor for aesthetic discernment is open to debate. According to Raymond Williams, '''Good taast' in the sense of good understanding is recorded from 1425 and 'no spiritual tast' from 1502''; Dabney Townsend reports in ...
... first used as a metaphor for aesthetic discernment is open to debate. According to Raymond Williams, '''Good taast' in the sense of good understanding is recorded from 1425 and 'no spiritual tast' from 1502''; Dabney Townsend reports in ...
Page 22
... first lines of the Paradise Lost smack of the great Poem. —John Keats, ''On Retribution, Or, The Chieftain's Daughter'' (1818) That Milton's Romantic readers should invoke the ''taste'' of his 22 2. Mortal Tastes: Milton.
... first lines of the Paradise Lost smack of the great Poem. —John Keats, ''On Retribution, Or, The Chieftain's Daughter'' (1818) That Milton's Romantic readers should invoke the ''taste'' of his 22 2. Mortal Tastes: Milton.
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 animal appeared appetite arts beauty become body bread British Byron called Cambridge cannibalism century Charles civilizing claims Coleridge considered consumer consumption critical cultural describes diet digestion discourse early economy Elia England English Essay existence experience expression feast feeding figure find first flesh French gastronomical George give gourmand Guide human hunger Hyperion ideal imagination John Juan Keats Keats’s Lakes Lamb Lamb’s letter lines literary living London manner material matter meal means metaphor Milton mind moral nature object organ original Oxford palate Paradise Lost person philosophical physical pleasure poem poet poetry political production reference relation rhetoric Roast Romantic Satan sense Shaftesbury smell social society stomach Studies sublime suggests symbolic taste term theory things Thomas tion trans turn University Press vols Wordsworth writes York