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 11
... organ of taste, reaching out from the belly: ''A craving Hungry Cavern / Thence arose his channeld Throat, / And like a red flame a Tongue'' (CPB 76). The tongue, commonly considered the organ of taste, was housed in the head but ...
... organ of taste, reaching out from the belly: ''A craving Hungry Cavern / Thence arose his channeld Throat, / And like a red flame a Tongue'' (CPB 76). The tongue, commonly considered the organ of taste, was housed in the head but ...
Page 12
... organ of digestion . . . exists, what cannot be affirmed of any other viscus, in perhaps all animals without exception; and, if the importance of parts may be estimated in this way, evidently holds the first rank among our organs ...
... organ of digestion . . . exists, what cannot be affirmed of any other viscus, in perhaps all animals without exception; and, if the importance of parts may be estimated in this way, evidently holds the first rank among our organs ...
Page 13
... organ (the inside of the mouth), and that the discrimination as well as the choice of palatable things is determined by it?'' (AN 144). What Kant faced was the difficulty of proceeding philosophically (according to a priori logic) when ...
... organ (the inside of the mouth), and that the discrimination as well as the choice of palatable things is determined by it?'' (AN 144). What Kant faced was the difficulty of proceeding philosophically (according to a priori logic) when ...
Page 55
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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