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 10
... bread , while the corpulent Prince of Wales hosted extravagant feasts at Carlton House and the equally large Louis XVI was caricatured as eating his way toward the border on his flight from France , arrested in the act of eating pig's ...
... bread , while the corpulent Prince of Wales hosted extravagant feasts at Carlton House and the equally large Louis XVI was caricatured as eating his way toward the border on his flight from France , arrested in the act of eating pig's ...
Page 20
... bread is cold . The seventh chapter of this book examines how Keats's similar ( indeed , far worse ) prob- lems with the physiology of taste prompted an enduring aesthetic critique that takes the form of an epic nausea we would now ...
... bread is cold . The seventh chapter of this book examines how Keats's similar ( indeed , far worse ) prob- lems with the physiology of taste prompted an enduring aesthetic critique that takes the form of an epic nausea we would now ...
Page 21
... bread riots , and Corn Laws . Revisiting central moments of British literary history through the metaphorical lens of consumption may help to initiate a dialogue among these diverse fields of research and recall the power of literary ...
... bread riots , and Corn Laws . Revisiting central moments of British literary history through the metaphorical lens of consumption may help to initiate a dialogue among these diverse fields of research and recall the power of literary ...
Page 22
... bread " ( which was quite sufficient for a hunger that had fasted “ forty days ” ) , is turned , in Paradise Regained , with more poetry than propriety , into the set out of a great feast , containing every delicacy in and out of season ...
... bread " ( which was quite sufficient for a hunger that had fasted “ forty days ” ) , is turned , in Paradise Regained , with more poetry than propriety , into the set out of a great feast , containing every delicacy in and out of season ...
Page 26
... — Milton writes that in the Mass " Christ is sacrificed each day by the priest ... [ his body ] is supposed to be made out of bread at the moment when the priest murmurs the four words , this is my body , 26 Mortal Taste.
... — Milton writes that in the Mass " Christ is sacrificed each day by the priest ... [ his body ] is supposed to be made out of bread at the moment when the priest murmurs the four words , this is my body , 26 Mortal Taste.
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