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 46
Page 1
... body has been put into the mouth , it is seized upon , gases , moisture , and all , without possibility of retreat . Lips stop whatever might try to escape ; the teeth bite and break it ; saliva drenches it ; the tongue mashes and ...
... body has been put into the mouth , it is seized upon , gases , moisture , and all , without possibility of retreat . Lips stop whatever might try to escape ; the teeth bite and break it ; saliva drenches it ; the tongue mashes and ...
Page 3
... body. The two are thought to convey immediate pleasure or disgust, serving to mediate dis- crete individuals (if at all) based on bodily instinct without reference to shared ideals. Not only is taste bound up with the unruly flesh ...
... body. The two are thought to convey immediate pleasure or disgust, serving to mediate dis- crete individuals (if at all) based on bodily instinct without reference to shared ideals. Not only is taste bound up with the unruly flesh ...
Page 4
... the physiological ground of its lived experience was simultaneously an effort to sublimate the social body into something more than the sum of its parts . 8 As one might expect , such an effort resulted in 4 Aesthetics and Appetite.
... the physiological ground of its lived experience was simultaneously an effort to sublimate the social body into something more than the sum of its parts . 8 As one might expect , such an effort resulted in 4 Aesthetics and Appetite.
Page 5
... body . In a very real sense , the Enlightenment culture of taste was a reaction against Hobbes's “ Leviathan , ” depicted in the 1651 frontispiece to the work of that title as a gigantic human torso crammed full of tiny anony- mous ...
... body . In a very real sense , the Enlightenment culture of taste was a reaction against Hobbes's “ Leviathan , ” depicted in the 1651 frontispiece to the work of that title as a gigantic human torso crammed full of tiny anony- mous ...
Page 6
... body itself could think , the Hobbesian image of the state was especially threatening . — Like other early modern ... Bodies , and Motions cannot . " 15 Appetite regulated a Hobbesian world in which life was nasty , brutish , and short ...
... body itself could think , the Hobbesian image of the state was especially threatening . — Like other early modern ... Bodies , and Motions cannot . " 15 Appetite regulated a Hobbesian world in which life was nasty , brutish , and short ...
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