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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... early drafts and allowing me to brush up against their original minds. I wish to acknowledge a number of scholars for their perspicacity and helpful commentary at various points along the way, particularly Ian Balfour, John Bender ...
... early drafts and allowing me to brush up against their original minds. I wish to acknowledge a number of scholars for their perspicacity and helpful commentary at various points along the way, particularly Ian Balfour, John Bender ...
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... Early Years, ed. Ernest De Selincourt. 2d ed., ed. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). Charles and Mary Lamb, The Letters of Charles Lamb, to which are added those of his sister, Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas. 3 vols ...
... Early Years, ed. Ernest De Selincourt. 2d ed., ed. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). Charles and Mary Lamb, The Letters of Charles Lamb, to which are added those of his sister, Mary Lamb, ed. E. V. Lucas. 3 vols ...
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... early nineteenth- century Britain elevated food to the status of the fine arts , adopting the same juridical language and concern with philosophical principles that defined the eighteenth - century discourse of aesthetics . Just as the ...
... early nineteenth- century Britain elevated food to the status of the fine arts , adopting the same juridical language and concern with philosophical principles that defined the eighteenth - century discourse of aesthetics . Just as the ...
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... earliest instantiations of British empiricist aesthetics at the outset of the eigh- teenth century its vocabulary was invoked in relation to the concept of taste. Taste, call it gustus, gusto, or goût (the Continent, after all, got ...
... earliest instantiations of British empiricist aesthetics at the outset of the eigh- teenth century its vocabulary was invoked in relation to the concept of taste. Taste, call it gustus, gusto, or goût (the Continent, after all, got ...
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... early modern theorists , Hobbes gave appetite the serious philo- sophical attention that taste would provoke in the eighteenth - century discourse of aesthetics . Contemporary physiology identified three distinct categories of appetite ...
... early modern theorists , Hobbes gave appetite the serious philo- sophical attention that taste would provoke in the eighteenth - century discourse of aesthetics . Contemporary physiology identified three distinct categories of appetite ...
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