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 viii
... Human Values and Dean's Fund for Scholarly Travel, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford. In addition, the International Conference on Romanticism, the North American Society for the Study ...
... Human Values and Dean's Fund for Scholarly Travel, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford. In addition, the International Conference on Romanticism, the North American Society for the Study ...
Page xi
... (1711 reprint; New York: Arno Press, 1976). THN David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby Bigge. 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). WCL Charles and Mary Lamb, The Works of Charles and Abbreviations xi.
... (1711 reprint; New York: Arno Press, 1976). THN David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby Bigge. 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). WCL Charles and Mary Lamb, The Works of Charles and Abbreviations xi.
Page 3
... human appetites is to risk becoming a glutton, a drunkard, or a voluptuary.∏ All the major Enlightenment philosophers of taste were involved in the civilizing process of sublimating the tasteful essence of selfhood from its own matter ...
... human appetites is to risk becoming a glutton, a drunkard, or a voluptuary.∏ All the major Enlightenment philosophers of taste were involved in the civilizing process of sublimating the tasteful essence of selfhood from its own matter ...
Page 4
... human beings were propelled not by natural cravings for virtue, beauty, and truth but by appetites that could not be civilized or distinguished from those of brutes. Human beings may be taxonomized as Homo sapiens, but in the eighteenth ...
... human beings were propelled not by natural cravings for virtue, beauty, and truth but by appetites that could not be civilized or distinguished from those of brutes. Human beings may be taxonomized as Homo sapiens, but in the eighteenth ...
Page 5
... human beings have much in common with beasts, only humans develop what are called cuisines: ''Humans are virtually the only creatures in the world that observe rules about what is eaten, how it is prepared, and with whom it is to be ...
... human beings have much in common with beasts, only humans develop what are called cuisines: ''Humans are virtually the only creatures in the world that observe rules about what is eaten, how it is prepared, and with whom it is to be ...
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