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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... Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , ed . James T. Boulton ( Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press , 1958 ) . PL / PR John Milton , Complete Poems and Major Prose , ed . Merritt Y ...
... Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful , ed . James T. Boulton ( Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press , 1958 ) . PL / PR John Milton , Complete Poems and Major Prose , ed . Merritt Y ...
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... philosophical principles that defined the eighteenth - century discourse of aesthetics . Just as the Enlightenment Man of Taste worked hard to distinguish specific qualities of beauty and to pro- nounce exact judgments of taste , the ...
... philosophical principles that defined the eighteenth - century discourse of aesthetics . Just as the Enlightenment Man of Taste worked hard to distinguish specific qualities of beauty and to pro- nounce exact judgments of taste , the ...
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... philosophical and physiological background in the long eighteenth century, the literary history of taste described by the chapters of this book reveals the complex relations between aesthetic taste and the more substantial phenomena of ...
... philosophical and physiological background in the long eighteenth century, the literary history of taste described by the chapters of this book reveals the complex relations between aesthetic taste and the more substantial phenomena of ...
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... philosophers alike stressed the importance of taste , which governed the cultural politics of food and commen- sality as well as the metaphysical implications of eating . The emergent public sphere made possible through commercialism ...
... philosophers alike stressed the importance of taste , which governed the cultural politics of food and commen- sality as well as the metaphysical implications of eating . The emergent public sphere made possible through commercialism ...
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... philosophers like Hobbes were most concerned — were the voluntary appetites for pleasure and their counterpart , an ... philosophical rival , Bernard Mandeville , high- lights the tension between the conceptual spheres of taste and ...
... philosophers like Hobbes were most concerned — were the voluntary appetites for pleasure and their counterpart , an ... philosophical rival , Bernard Mandeville , high- lights the tension between the conceptual spheres of taste and ...
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