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 2
... Keats's experience of epic nausea. Confronting the metaphor of consumption in the field of representation, as this book will show, these writers perform their own critique of the Romantic ideology (conceived as a 2 Aesthetics and Appetite.
... Keats's experience of epic nausea. Confronting the metaphor of consumption in the field of representation, as this book will show, these writers perform their own critique of the Romantic ideology (conceived as a 2 Aesthetics and Appetite.
Page 3
... consumption is considered a matter of individual choice, and the so-called Man of Taste had to navigate an increasing tide of consumables, seeking distinction through the exercise of discrimination.∂ An overdetermined, multivalenced ...
... consumption is considered a matter of individual choice, and the so-called Man of Taste had to navigate an increasing tide of consumables, seeking distinction through the exercise of discrimination.∂ An overdetermined, multivalenced ...
Page 10
... consumption, neither the rich (whose palates were symbolically vitiated by overindulgence) nor the poor (whose objective was merely to eat) contributed representative members to tasteful society. The Physiology of Taste Philosophers ...
... consumption, neither the rich (whose palates were symbolically vitiated by overindulgence) nor the poor (whose objective was merely to eat) contributed representative members to tasteful society. The Physiology of Taste Philosophers ...
Page 15
... consumption of women, along with the shopping, exhibition, and other types of female consumerism that fed into the story. To top it off, the novel contained frequent scenes with food, and writers as diverse as Mary Wollstonecraft and ...
... consumption of women, along with the shopping, exhibition, and other types of female consumerism that fed into the story. To top it off, the novel contained frequent scenes with food, and writers as diverse as Mary Wollstonecraft and ...
Page 17
... , describe a fictional world that anticipates and renders visible the philosophical construction of taste as a symbolic economy of consumption. As Paradise Lost and Regained make clear, the discrimination of Aesthetics and Appetite 17.
... , describe a fictional world that anticipates and renders visible the philosophical construction of taste as a symbolic economy of consumption. As Paradise Lost and Regained make clear, the discrimination of Aesthetics and Appetite 17.
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