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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Page 3
... object of contemplation (hence for the regulating principles of consciousness and 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 ...
... object of contemplation (hence for the regulating principles of consciousness and 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 ...
Page 5
... the result of appetite or aversion: a mental instinct toward or away from an object, regulated by external control. His portrait of the state as an aggregation of appetites only gained sway after Locke raised Aesthetics and Appetite 5.
... the result of appetite or aversion: a mental instinct toward or away from an object, regulated by external control. His portrait of the state as an aggregation of appetites only gained sway after Locke raised Aesthetics and Appetite 5.
Page 16
... object in its totality.''∑∑ Taste, understood in its fullest sense as a gustatory mode of aesthetic experience, is a way out of abstraction and into a robust sensibility that flourished in the period known as Romanticism. Precisely ...
... object in its totality.''∑∑ Taste, understood in its fullest sense as a gustatory mode of aesthetic experience, is a way out of abstraction and into a robust sensibility that flourished in the period known as Romanticism. Precisely ...
Page 19
... objects), or of commodities. In a culture that puts all appetite, gastrointestinal as well as sexual, to work within a symbolic economy of consumption, there can be no room for nonproductive expenditure: all pleasures that do not lead ...
... objects), or of commodities. In a culture that puts all appetite, gastrointestinal as well as sexual, to work within a symbolic economy of consumption, there can be no room for nonproductive expenditure: all pleasures that do not lead ...
Page 28
... object but is also alternately repelled thereby'' (CJ 91). Milton does not let the matter go with a simple extrusion, but upon further reflection describes an even more graphic evacuation: ''the Mass brings down Christ's holy body from ...
... object but is also alternately repelled thereby'' (CJ 91). Milton does not let the matter go with a simple extrusion, but upon further reflection describes an even more graphic evacuation: ''the Mass brings down Christ's holy body from ...
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