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. |
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Page vii
... become what it is. And I am very grateful to Starry Schor and Michael Wood, both of Princeton University, for wading through early drafts and allowing me to brush up against their original minds. I wish to acknowledge a number of ...
... become what it is. And I am very grateful to Starry Schor and Michael Wood, both of Princeton University, for wading through early drafts and allowing me to brush up against their original minds. I wish to acknowledge a number of ...
Page 3
... becoming a glutton, a drunkard, or a voluptuary.∏ All the major Enlightenment philosophers of taste were involved in the civilizing process of sublimating the tasteful essence of selfhood from its own matter and motions, appetites and ...
... becoming a glutton, a drunkard, or a voluptuary.∏ All the major Enlightenment philosophers of taste were involved in the civilizing process of sublimating the tasteful essence of selfhood from its own matter and motions, appetites and ...
Page 9
... becomes the standard of pickles and seasoning.''≤π Having a taste to distinguish between pickles and seasonings may ... becoming pragmatically conflated. Johnson himself claimed that he ''could write a better book of cookery than has ...
... becomes the standard of pickles and seasoning.''≤π Having a taste to distinguish between pickles and seasonings may ... becoming pragmatically conflated. Johnson himself claimed that he ''could write a better book of cookery than has ...
Page 18
... become respectable members of civil society and even leaders in public taste under the appellation of the gastronome. In these years gastronomy emerged as a distinct literary genre—witty, eclectic as table talk, treating food with ...
... become respectable members of civil society and even leaders in public taste under the appellation of the gastronome. In these years gastronomy emerged as a distinct literary genre—witty, eclectic as table talk, treating food with ...
Page 21
... become inextricable from the politics of colonial foodstuffs, such as sugar, spice, and tea, and cultural studies have revealed the ways in which the social landscapes of Romantic-period fiction took shape against all-too-real panoramas ...
... become inextricable from the politics of colonial foodstuffs, such as sugar, spice, and tea, and cultural studies have revealed the ways in which the social landscapes of Romantic-period fiction took shape against all-too-real panoramas ...
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