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 xi
... Thomas H. D. Mahoney (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955). SP Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's Prose; or the Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988). SPP Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's Poetry and Prose ...
... Thomas H. D. Mahoney (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955). SP Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's Prose; or the Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988). SPP Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's Poetry and Prose ...
Page 8
... Thomas Newcomb's 1733 ''The Woman of Taste'' (a gendered differential to which we shall return) satirizes the social necessity of controlling one's appetite in public: When seated at the board you take your place, Invited by his honour ...
... Thomas Newcomb's 1733 ''The Woman of Taste'' (a gendered differential to which we shall return) satirizes the social necessity of controlling one's appetite in public: When seated at the board you take your place, Invited by his honour ...
Page 10
... Thomas Poole on March 23, 1801, 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 ...
... Thomas Poole on March 23, 1801, 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 ...
Page 11
... Thomas Willis, and other iatrochemists, eighteenth-century taste philosophers inherited the humoral model of human physiology descended from Galen: one that viewed mind and body as a psychosomatic system of four humors (blood, choler ...
... Thomas Willis, and other iatrochemists, eighteenth-century taste philosophers inherited the humoral model of human physiology descended from Galen: one that viewed mind and body as a psychosomatic system of four humors (blood, choler ...
Page 50
... Thomas Coryate's popular seventeenth-century travel narrative, Coryats Crudities: Hastily Gobled vp in Five Moneths Trauells in France, Sauoy, Italy . . . Newly Digested in the Hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, & now ...
... Thomas Coryate's popular seventeenth-century travel narrative, Coryats Crudities: Hastily Gobled vp in Five Moneths Trauells in France, Sauoy, Italy . . . Newly Digested in the Hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset, & now ...
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