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 54
Page ix
... Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 13 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). C Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein ...
... Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 13 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). C Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein ...
Page x
... Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, ed. Ernest De Selincourt. 2d ed., ed. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). LL Charles and Mary Lamb, The Letters of Charles Lamb, to which are added those of his ...
... Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, ed. Ernest De Selincourt. 2d ed., ed. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). LL Charles and Mary Lamb, The Letters of Charles Lamb, to which are added those of his ...
Page xi
... letters from May 27, 1796, through October 1817. LMY Ernest De Selincourt, ed., The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 2nd edition Mary Moorman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970). PE Edmund Burke, A Philosophical ...
... letters from May 27, 1796, through October 1817. LMY Ernest De Selincourt, ed., The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, 2nd edition Mary Moorman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970). PE Edmund Burke, A Philosophical ...
Page 19
... letters addressed to the Morning Post in December 1844 protest the ''rash assault'' of the English railway into the Lake District and encourage ''all persons of taste'' to join him in denouncing the threat (PW 3:339). Together, these ...
... letters addressed to the Morning Post in December 1844 protest the ''rash assault'' of the English railway into the Lake District and encourage ''all persons of taste'' to join him in denouncing the threat (PW 3:339). Together, these ...
Page 30
... letter to Leonard Philaras, he records: ''It is ten years, I think, more or less, since I noticed my sight becoming weak and growing dim, and at the same time my spleen and all my viscera burdened and shaken with flatulence'' 30 Mortal ...
... letter to Leonard Philaras, he records: ''It is ten years, I think, more or less, since I noticed my sight becoming weak and growing dim, and at the same time my spleen and all my viscera burdened and shaken with flatulence'' 30 Mortal ...
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