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 iv
... English literature—History and criticism. 2. Taste in literature. 3. Food habits in literature. 4. Gastronomy in literature. 5. Aesthetics, British. 6. Food in literature. I. Title. PR408.T37G54 2005 820.9%3559—dc22 2004058452 A ...
... English literature—History and criticism. 2. Taste in literature. 3. Food habits in literature. 4. Gastronomy in literature. 5. Aesthetics, British. 6. Food in literature. I. Title. PR408.T37G54 2005 820.9%3559—dc22 2004058452 A ...
Page 2
... English), was an apt metaphor for a kind of pleasure that does not submit to objective laws: de gustibus non est disputandum; chacun à son goût; sobre los gustos, no hai disputa; or, there is no disputing about taste. While most ...
... English), was an apt metaphor for a kind of pleasure that does not submit to objective laws: de gustibus non est disputandum; chacun à son goût; sobre los gustos, no hai disputa; or, there is no disputing about taste. While most ...
Page 16
... English in the seventeenth century in a culinary context and became a staple term of Romantic aesthetics by way of Hazlitt.∑∂ In experiencing gusto, as James Engell writes, the ''senses work together like fingers on a hand and grasp ...
... English in the seventeenth century in a culinary context and became a staple term of Romantic aesthetics by way of Hazlitt.∑∂ In experiencing gusto, as James Engell writes, the ''senses work together like fingers on a hand and grasp ...
Page 17
... English.∏≥ His epic representations of gustatory taste, the following chapter of this book argues, describe a fictional world that anticipates and renders visible the philosophical construction of taste as a symbolic economy of ...
... English.∏≥ His epic representations of gustatory taste, the following chapter of this book argues, describe a fictional world that anticipates and renders visible the philosophical construction of taste as a symbolic economy of ...
Page 19
... English railway into the Lake District and encourage ''all persons of taste'' to join him in denouncing the threat (PW 3:339). Together, these writings suggest the degree to which the poet's extraordinary ambitions for taste (whereby ...
... English railway into the Lake District and encourage ''all persons of taste'' to join him in denouncing the threat (PW 3:339). Together, these writings suggest the degree to which the poet's extraordinary ambitions for taste (whereby ...
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