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
Results 1-5 of 27
Page 7
... ideal of the sensus communis , pro- moted by Shaftesbury and other taste philosophers as a community united in a tasteful harmony of feeling . The philosophical project of sublimating the Man of Taste from his own matter and motions ...
... ideal of the sensus communis , pro- moted by Shaftesbury and other taste philosophers as a community united in a tasteful harmony of feeling . The philosophical project of sublimating the Man of Taste from his own matter and motions ...
Page 9
... ideal through the faculty of representation . Food ( in Kant's words ) " must appear only as a vehicle " for this more important event of social community . Kant's anthropological successors also read Aesthetics and Appetite 9.
... ideal through the faculty of representation . Food ( in Kant's words ) " must appear only as a vehicle " for this more important event of social community . Kant's anthropological successors also read Aesthetics and Appetite 9.
Page 16
... ideal- immaterial subjectivity , but the senses of touch , taste , and smell demand an actual self engaged in the world of material presence . Coleridge for one stressed the role of “ all tangible ideas & sensations " in forming the ...
... ideal- immaterial subjectivity , but the senses of touch , taste , and smell demand an actual self engaged in the world of material presence . Coleridge for one stressed the role of “ all tangible ideas & sensations " in forming the ...
Page 18
... ideal of tasteful selfhood- or to cite Shaftesbury , they adopt a " method of evacuation " ( C74 ) . Sir Joshua Reynolds instructed audiences in the 1770s that the " refinement of taste ... by disentan- gling the mind from appetite ...
... ideal of tasteful selfhood- or to cite Shaftesbury , they adopt a " method of evacuation " ( C74 ) . Sir Joshua Reynolds instructed audiences in the 1770s that the " refinement of taste ... by disentan- gling the mind from appetite ...
Page 19
... ideal of natural taste against the " fickle tastes and fickle appetites " promoted through urban commercial commotion , Charles Lamb was employed by a major importer of colonial foodstuffs , such as tea and sugar , and hence was ...
... ideal of natural taste against the " fickle tastes and fickle appetites " promoted through urban commercial commotion , Charles Lamb was employed by a major importer of colonial foodstuffs , such as tea and sugar , and hence was ...
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