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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Page ix
... Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71). CCW Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn. 14 vols. (Princeton: Princeton ...
... Coleridge, Collected Letters, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956–71). CCW Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn. 14 vols. (Princeton: Princeton ...
Page x
A Literary History Denise Gigante. CN Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn. 5 vols.; each in 2 vols.: 1 text, 2 notes (London: Routledge, 2002). CPB William Blake, The Complete Poetry and ...
A Literary History Denise Gigante. CN Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn. 5 vols.; each in 2 vols.: 1 text, 2 notes (London: Routledge, 2002). CPB William Blake, The Complete Poetry and ...
Page 10
... Coleridge complained: ''I am oppressed at times with a true heart-gnawing melancholy when I contemplate the state of my poor oppressed Country.—God knows, it is as much as I can do to put meat and bread on my own table; & hourly some ...
... Coleridge complained: ''I am oppressed at times with a true heart-gnawing melancholy when I contemplate the state of my poor oppressed Country.—God knows, it is as much as I can do to put meat and bread on my own table; & hourly some ...
Page 12
... Coleridge, the ''lower'' faculties, such as the ''Olfactories, Gustatories, and organ of the Skin,'' carried on the work of touch in order to ''assimilate or transform the external into the personal, or combine them thus assimilated ...
... Coleridge, the ''lower'' faculties, such as the ''Olfactories, Gustatories, and organ of the Skin,'' carried on the work of touch in order to ''assimilate or transform the external into the personal, or combine them thus assimilated ...
Page 13
... Coleridge complained that it had gone too far: ''One man may say I delight in Milton and Shakespeare more than Turtle or Venison another man that is not my case for myself I think a good dish of turtle and a good bottle of port ...
... Coleridge complained that it had gone too far: ''One man may say I delight in Milton and Shakespeare more than Turtle or Venison another man that is not my case for myself I think a good dish of turtle and a good bottle of port ...
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