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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... Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller. 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985). Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press ...
... Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller. 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985). Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press ...
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... essay against gulosity ” ( gluttony ) , Johnson fashions a fictional “ philosophe ” of food.26 Venturing from table to table and pronouncing judgment upon the food he is served , " Gulosolus " ( the title character ) " by this practice ...
... essay against gulosity ” ( gluttony ) , Johnson fashions a fictional “ philosophe ” of food.26 Venturing from table to table and pronouncing judgment upon the food he is served , " Gulosolus " ( the title character ) " by this practice ...
Page 17
... essay " On Taste " : " Gratian very often rec- ommends the fine Taste , as the utmost Perfection of an accomplished Man " ( SPT 3 : 527 ) . The importance of the reference is that , already for Gracián , as Hans - Georg Gadamer writes ...
... essay " On Taste " : " Gratian very often rec- ommends the fine Taste , as the utmost Perfection of an accomplished Man " ( SPT 3 : 527 ) . The importance of the reference is that , already for Gracián , as Hans - Georg Gadamer writes ...
Page 19
... essays on taste , including the 1810 Essays upon Epitaphs and Guide to the Lakes ( begun in 1810 , published in 1835 ) , map the feeding mind directly onto the material ecology of the Lakes . Later , his two letters addressed to the ...
... essays on taste , including the 1810 Essays upon Epitaphs and Guide to the Lakes ( begun in 1810 , published in 1835 ) , map the feeding mind directly onto the material ecology of the Lakes . Later , his two letters addressed to the ...
Page 46
... essay “ Of the Standard of Taste ” to overturn the view that all sentiment is right , or de gustibus non est disputandum ( EMP 230-31 ) ; Addison finds that " in the greatness of his Sentiments . . . [ Milton ] triumphs over all the ...
... essay “ Of the Standard of Taste ” to overturn the view that all sentiment is right , or de gustibus non est disputandum ( EMP 230-31 ) ; Addison finds that " in the greatness of his Sentiments . . . [ Milton ] triumphs over all 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