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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... mind. My deepest debts of gratitude are to Harold Bloom for inspiring and supporting my life as a scholar; to Jay ... minds. I wish to acknowledge a number of scholars for their perspicacity and helpful commentary at various points along ...
... mind. My deepest debts of gratitude are to Harold Bloom for inspiring and supporting my life as a scholar; to Jay ... minds. I wish to acknowledge a number of scholars for their perspicacity and helpful commentary at various points along ...
Page 2
... mind, to Keats's experience of epic nausea. Confronting the metaphor of consumption in the field of representation, as this book will show, these writers perform their own critique of the Romantic ideology (conceived as a 2 Aesthetics ...
... mind, to Keats's experience of epic nausea. Confronting the metaphor of consumption in the field of representation, as this book will show, these writers perform their own critique of the Romantic ideology (conceived as a 2 Aesthetics ...
Page 3
... 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 smell, is bound up with ...
... 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 smell, is bound up with ...
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... mind and the world of sensory reality , mediated only by the senses , which were themselves highly unreliable . How could one tell , for instance , whether the sense impressions conveyed to the mind were an accurate representation of ...
... mind and the world of sensory reality , mediated only by the senses , which were themselves highly unreliable . How could one tell , for instance , whether the sense impressions conveyed to the mind were an accurate representation of ...
Page 5
... mind , in a certain degree ; but no beast is a cook , " he claimed . “ The trick of the monkey using the cat's paw to roast a chestnut , is only a piece of shrewd malice in that turpissima bestia , which humbles us so sadly by its ...
... mind , in a certain degree ; but no beast is a cook , " he claimed . “ The trick of the monkey using the cat's paw to roast a chestnut , is only a piece of shrewd malice in that turpissima bestia , which humbles us so sadly by its ...
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