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
Results 1-5 of 53
Page 1
... Romantic gastronomers , self - proclaimed professors of taste , considered the profoundly physical pleasures of the palate to be the pinnacle of aesthetic appreciation . Various " committees of taste " established in early nineteenth ...
... Romantic gastronomers , self - proclaimed professors of taste , considered the profoundly physical pleasures of the palate to be the pinnacle of aesthetic appreciation . Various " committees of taste " established in early nineteenth ...
Page 2
... Romantics learn from Milton and that we learn from Romanticism—and the literary history pre- sented here reroutes aesthetic history from its origins in European neoclassi- cism ... Romantic ideology (conceived as a 2 Aesthetics and Appetite.
... Romantics learn from Milton and that we learn from Romanticism—and the literary history pre- sented here reroutes aesthetic history from its origins in European neoclassi- cism ... Romantic ideology (conceived as a 2 Aesthetics and Appetite.
Page 3
... Romantic era were the result not only of an Industrial Revolution, but of a Consumer Revolution as well. Unlike the social structures of production, consumption is considered a matter of individual choice, and the so-called Man of Taste ...
... Romantic era were the result not only of an Industrial Revolution, but of a Consumer Revolution as well. Unlike the social structures of production, consumption is considered a matter of individual choice, and the so-called Man of Taste ...
Page 5
... Romantic epicureans and aesthetic philosophers alike stressed the importance of taste , which governed the cultural politics of food and commen- sality as well as the metaphysical implications of eating . The emergent public sphere made ...
... Romantic epicureans and aesthetic philosophers alike stressed the importance of taste , which governed the cultural politics of food and commen- sality as well as the metaphysical implications of eating . The emergent public sphere made ...
Page 12
... Romantic period presided over the production of tasteful subjects . Before modern medicine made probing beyond the subjective border of skin a less problematic venture , physicians relied on what was evacuated or ex- pelled from the ...
... Romantic period presided over the production of tasteful subjects . Before modern medicine made probing beyond the subjective border of skin a less problematic venture , physicians relied on what was evacuated or ex- pelled from 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