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 3
... flesh; traditionally, it is associated with too intense bodily pleasure and the consequent dangers of excess. While the exertion of the higher senses theoretically leads to more mind, the exercise of the lower senses of taste and smell ...
... flesh; traditionally, it is associated with too intense bodily pleasure and the consequent dangers of excess. While the exertion of the higher senses theoretically leads to more mind, the exercise of the lower senses of taste and smell ...
Page 18
... flesh - eating to describe a masochistic countervision of low - urban taste . Byron uses cannibalism to cri- tique the vampiric forces of nineteenth - century capitalism , and his contem- porary Keats portrays an epic scene of ...
... flesh - eating to describe a masochistic countervision of low - urban taste . Byron uses cannibalism to cri- tique the vampiric forces of nineteenth - century capitalism , and his contem- porary Keats portrays an epic scene of ...
Page 19
... flesh - loving gourmand , but “ A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig " reveals the degree to which Lamb's unique style of comic melancholy is physiologically seated in the stomach . In a similar but opposite manner to Lamb , Byron responds to ...
... flesh - loving gourmand , but “ A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig " reveals the degree to which Lamb's unique style of comic melancholy is physiologically seated in the stomach . In a similar but opposite manner to Lamb , Byron responds to ...
Page 25
... flesh - eating was an " unnatural " postlapsarian practice , though the more common view in Milton's day was that raw , uncooked fruit was unnatural . Dietary authors of the time often resorted to metaphors of physical economy in ...
... flesh - eating was an " unnatural " postlapsarian practice , though the more common view in Milton's day was that raw , uncooked fruit was unnatural . Dietary authors of the time often resorted to metaphors of physical economy in ...
Page 26
... flesh is actually consumed , one is transported out of the sacramental and into the superstitious sphere of idolatry . This denial of the literal interpretation of the mandate to accept sacrifice and eat flesh was part of the ...
... flesh is actually consumed , one is transported out of the sacramental and into the superstitious sphere of idolatry . This denial of the literal interpretation of the mandate to accept sacrifice and eat flesh was part of the ...
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