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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... Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller. 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985). Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924) ...
... Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller. 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985). Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye. 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924) ...
Page 2
... moral errors of judgment: it also involves a kind of judgment inextricable from pleasure. That taste involves pleasure is a lesson the Romantics learn from Milton and that we learn from Romanticism—and the literary history pre- sented ...
... moral errors of judgment: it also involves a kind of judgment inextricable from pleasure. That taste involves pleasure is a lesson the Romantics learn from Milton and that we learn from Romanticism—and the literary history pre- sented ...
Page 3
... morality), taste, like its closest cousin smell, is bound up with the chemical physiology of the body. The two are thought to convey immediate pleasure or disgust, serving to mediate dis- crete individuals (if at all) based on bodily ...
... morality), taste, like its closest cousin smell, is bound up with the chemical physiology of the body. The two are thought to convey immediate pleasure or disgust, serving to mediate dis- crete individuals (if at all) based on bodily ...
Page 6
... morality , aesthetic pleasures and pains ; the umbrella term for this new mode of embodied cognition was taste . Anthony Ashley Cooper , third earl of Shaftesbury , was the prototype for the eighteenth - century Man of Taste , and the moral ...
... morality , aesthetic pleasures and pains ; the umbrella term for this new mode of embodied cognition was taste . Anthony Ashley Cooper , third earl of Shaftesbury , was the prototype for the eighteenth - century Man of Taste , and the moral ...
Page 18
... morally corrupted waste , Enlightenment taste theorists purge all defects and dregs ( the term is used here too ) from the philosophical ideal of tasteful selfhood- or to cite Shaftesbury , they adopt a " method of evacuation " ( C74 ) ...
... morally corrupted waste , Enlightenment taste theorists purge all defects and dregs ( the term is used here too ) from the philosophical ideal of tasteful selfhood- or to cite Shaftesbury , they adopt a " method of evacuation " ( C74 ) ...
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