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 43
Page 3
... means of ingress to the mind.∑ Whereas sight and hearing allow for a proper representative distance from the object of contemplation (hence for the regulating principles of consciousness and morality), taste, like its closest cousin ...
... means of ingress to the mind.∑ Whereas sight and hearing allow for a proper representative distance from the object of contemplation (hence for the regulating principles of consciousness and morality), taste, like its closest cousin ...
Page 4
... means to be human - or more than an assemblage of animal anatomy - was a bone he tossed to the theologians or " those , who have better thought of that matter . " 7 The empirical tradition that grew up in his wake of course had much ...
... means to be human - or more than an assemblage of animal anatomy - was a bone he tossed to the theologians or " those , who have better thought of that matter . " 7 The empirical tradition that grew up in his wake of course had much ...
Page 6
... means of nerves and muscles , but it was far more difficult to explain the mechanism of mental activity . Hobbes wrote that “ the Schooles find in meere Appetite to go , or move , no actuall Motion at all : but because some Motion they ...
... means of nerves and muscles , but it was far more difficult to explain the mechanism of mental activity . Hobbes wrote that “ the Schooles find in meere Appetite to go , or move , no actuall Motion at all : but because some Motion they ...
Page 11
... means of heat , sending it out through the alimentary avenues of the body , as if from a kitchen . According to Galen , fountainhead of early modern medicine , timing and environment were impor- tant , since if food were undercooked it ...
... means of heat , sending it out through the alimentary avenues of the body , as if from a kitchen . According to Galen , fountainhead of early modern medicine , timing and environment were impor- tant , since if food were undercooked it ...
Page 12
... means to be human , the manner in which the sentient being processes the physical world was far from clear . In 1786 the British physiologist John Hunter noted that digestion is “ one of the most important operations of the animal ...
... means to be human , the manner in which the sentient being processes the physical world was far from clear . In 1786 the British physiologist John Hunter noted that digestion is “ one of the most important operations of the animal ...
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 |
Other editions - View all
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