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. |
From inside the book
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Page 1
... pleasures of the palate to be the pinnacle of aesthetic appreciation. Various ''committees of taste'' established in early nineteenth- century Britain elevated food to the status of the fine arts, adopting the same juridical language ...
... pleasures of the palate to be the pinnacle of aesthetic appreciation. Various ''committees of taste'' established in early nineteenth- century Britain elevated food to the status of the fine arts, adopting the same juridical language ...
Page 2
... pleasure, and pleasure is its own way of knowing. Genealogies that trace modern aesthetic theory back through British empiricism to the mid- seventeenth-century European concern with goût and gusto skip over a source much closer to home ...
... pleasure, and pleasure is its own way of knowing. Genealogies that trace modern aesthetic theory back through British empiricism to the mid- seventeenth-century European concern with goût and gusto skip over a source much closer to home ...
Page 3
... pleasure or disgust, serving to mediate discrete individuals (if at all) based on bodily instinct without reference to shared ideals. Not only is taste bound up with the unruly flesh; traditionally, it is associated with too intense ...
... pleasure or disgust, serving to mediate discrete individuals (if at all) based on bodily instinct without reference to shared ideals. Not only is taste bound up with the unruly flesh; traditionally, it is associated with too intense ...
Page 6
... pleasure and pain apart from circumstance, and ''irascible'' or ''invading'' appetites, which were stimulated by ... pleasures and pains; the umbrella term for this new mode of embodied cognition was taste. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third ...
... pleasure and pain apart from circumstance, and ''irascible'' or ''invading'' appetites, which were stimulated by ... pleasures and pains; the umbrella term for this new mode of embodied cognition was taste. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third ...
Page 7
... ; . . . the psychological and material arena in which the elections of what has been called the 'politics of signification' were contested.''≤∞ Whereas the animal pleasures of eating demand appetite, Aesthetics and Appetite 7.
... ; . . . the psychological and material arena in which the elections of what has been called the 'politics of signification' were contested.''≤∞ Whereas the animal pleasures of eating demand appetite, Aesthetics and Appetite 7.
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