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. |
From inside the book
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... Charles and Mary Lamb, The Letters of Charles Lamb, to which are added those of his sister, Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas. 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1935): the authoritative edition of letters from October 1817 through 1843. William and ...
... Charles and Mary Lamb, The Letters of Charles Lamb, to which are added those of his sister, Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas. 3 vols. (London: Methuen, 1935): the authoritative edition of letters from October 1817 through 1843. William and ...
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... ( 1711 reprint ; New York : Arno Press , 1976 ) . David Hume , A Treatise of Human Nature , ed . L. A. Selby Bigge . 2d ed . ( Oxford : Clarendon Press , 1978 ) . WCL WMP WU YP Charles and Mary Lamb , The Abbreviations ' મેં.
... ( 1711 reprint ; New York : Arno Press , 1976 ) . David Hume , A Treatise of Human Nature , ed . L. A. Selby Bigge . 2d ed . ( Oxford : Clarendon Press , 1978 ) . WCL WMP WU YP Charles and Mary Lamb , The Abbreviations ' મેં.
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A Literary History Denise Gigante. WCL WMP WU YP Charles and Mary Lamb , The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb , ed . E. V. Lucas . 8 vols . ( London : Methuen , 1903 ) . William Makepeace Thackeray , The Works of William Makepeace ...
A Literary History Denise Gigante. WCL WMP WU YP Charles and Mary Lamb , The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb , ed . E. V. Lucas . 8 vols . ( London : Methuen , 1903 ) . William Makepeace Thackeray , The Works of William Makepeace ...
Page 19
... Charles Lamb was employed by a major importer of colonial foodstuffs , such as tea and sugar , and hence was involved in an enterprise of British commercial expansion . What the Lake poets shared with a second generation of high ...
... Charles Lamb was employed by a major importer of colonial foodstuffs , such as tea and sugar , and hence was involved in an enterprise of British commercial expansion . What the Lake poets shared with a second generation of high ...
Page 21
... Charles Dickens also capitalized on the frenzy of conspicuous con- sumption characterizing mid - nineteenth - century Britain ; the ostentatious din- ner parties of Our Mutual Friend ( 1865 ) reveal the latter - day aesthetic of ...
... Charles Dickens also capitalized on the frenzy of conspicuous con- sumption characterizing mid - nineteenth - century Britain ; the ostentatious din- ner parties of Our Mutual Friend ( 1865 ) reveal the latter - day aesthetic of ...
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