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 vii
... original minds. I wish to acknowledge a number of scholars for their perspicacity and helpful commentary at various points along the way, particularly Ian Balfour, John Bender, Terry Castle, David L. Clark, Ian Duncan, Diana Fuss, Erik ...
... original minds. I wish to acknowledge a number of scholars for their perspicacity and helpful commentary at various points along the way, particularly Ian Balfour, John Bender, Terry Castle, David L. Clark, Ian Duncan, Diana Fuss, Erik ...
Page 25
... original Hebrew this fruit is tappach, which the Vulgate translates as malum, or apple, with a pun on the short-a variant meaning bad. Some argue that ''apple'' can stand for any fleshy fruit, since only Satan calls it an apple, thereby ...
... original Hebrew this fruit is tappach, which the Vulgate translates as malum, or apple, with a pun on the short-a variant meaning bad. Some argue that ''apple'' can stand for any fleshy fruit, since only Satan calls it an apple, thereby ...
Page 27
... original unity as the Un-exchangeable divine presence sustaining this cycle of consumption, does that not destabilize the traditional view that God (in Derrida's words) ''gives more than he promises, [that] he submits to no exchange ...
... original unity as the Un-exchangeable divine presence sustaining this cycle of consumption, does that not destabilize the traditional view that God (in Derrida's words) ''gives more than he promises, [that] he submits to no exchange ...
Page 30
... original matter was not an evil thing, nor to be thought of as worthless: it was good, and it contained the seeds of all subsequent good. . . . It was in a confused and disordered state at first, but afterwards God made it ordered and ...
... original matter was not an evil thing, nor to be thought of as worthless: it was good, and it contained the seeds of all subsequent good. . . . It was in a confused and disordered state at first, but afterwards God made it ordered and ...
Page 37
... original sense of ''taking part'' in that truth, one becomes ''a member incorporate'' unto the thing consumed. Not only is it true that as one eats one is eaten, therefore; we may even venture to assert, on the authority of Milton, that ...
... original sense of ''taking part'' in that truth, one becomes ''a member incorporate'' unto the thing consumed. Not only is it true that as one eats one is eaten, therefore; we may even venture to assert, on the authority of Milton, that ...
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