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 3
... civilizing pro- cess of sublimating the tasteful essence of selfhood from its own matter and motions, appetites and aversions, passions and physical sensibilities. Above all , what the culture of taste energetically resisted was ...
... civilizing pro- cess of sublimating the tasteful essence of selfhood from its own matter and motions, appetites and aversions, passions and physical sensibilities. Above all , what the culture of taste energetically resisted was ...
Page 7
... civilizing process in which individuals were taught to regulate themselves , and their motivating appetites , from within.18 Situated at the intersection of appetite and manners , taste was in many ways a middle - class affair targeted ...
... civilizing process in which individuals were taught to regulate themselves , and their motivating appetites , from within.18 Situated at the intersection of appetite and manners , taste was in many ways a middle - class affair targeted ...
Page 8
... civilizing appetite through the developing etiquette of manners . Dr. Samuel Johnson , despite his own infamous table manners , recognized the symbolic power of the dinner table as a site of social communion . Accord- ing to his ...
... civilizing appetite through the developing etiquette of manners . Dr. Samuel Johnson , despite his own infamous table manners , recognized the symbolic power of the dinner table as a site of social communion . Accord- ing to his ...
Page 11
... civilizing discourse of taste , the effort was to repress , not to express , that knowledge . Despite the fact that the latter part of the seventeenth century introduced new models of human digestion and nutrition by way of Jean ...
... civilizing discourse of taste , the effort was to repress , not to express , that knowledge . Despite the fact that the latter part of the seventeenth century introduced new models of human digestion and nutrition by way of Jean ...
Page 14
... civilizing progress from necessity to luxury was also conceived of as a trajectory away from instinctual desire , whether coded as " natural diet " or " natural " ( hetero ) sexuality : Why laugh at TASTE ? It is a harmless Fashion ...
... civilizing progress from necessity to luxury was also conceived of as a trajectory away from instinctual desire , whether coded as " natural diet " or " natural " ( hetero ) sexuality : Why laugh at TASTE ? It is a harmless Fashion ...
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