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
Results 1-5 of 63
Page 2
... poetic ''language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things'' (SPP 482), and most theorists of metaphor agree that rather than operating by reference to external reality or truth, it has a ...
... poetic ''language is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things'' (SPP 482), and most theorists of metaphor agree that rather than operating by reference to external reality or truth, it has a ...
Page 15
... Poets and novelists alike acknowledged that an increasing demand for “ ephemera , ” such as newspapers , memoirs , and novels , posed a serious challenge to the poet who held himself responsible for creating ( not catering to ) the ...
... Poets and novelists alike acknowledged that an increasing demand for “ ephemera , ” such as newspapers , memoirs , and novels , posed a serious challenge to the poet who held himself responsible for creating ( not catering to ) the ...
Page 19
... poet's extraordinary ambitions for taste ( whereby " the taste , intellectual Power , and morals of a Country are ... poets shared with a second generation of high Romanticism , defined by Shelley and his circle through “ natural ” or ...
... poet's extraordinary ambitions for taste ( whereby " the taste , intellectual Power , and morals of a Country are ... poets shared with a second generation of high Romanticism , defined by Shelley and his circle through “ natural ” or ...
Page 20
... poets experienced physical hunger and fantasies of aversion that extend their shad- ows past Romanticism.6 One high , the other low ; one striking readers as world - weary , the other striking them as wide - eyed : Byron and Keats ...
... poets experienced physical hunger and fantasies of aversion that extend their shad- ows past Romanticism.6 One high , the other low ; one striking readers as world - weary , the other striking them as wide - eyed : Byron and Keats ...
Page 22
... poet in our own country who has written with the greatest gusto on the subject of eating is Milton . He omits none of the pleasures of the palate , great or small . In his Latin poems , when young , he speaks of the pears and chestnuts ...
... poet in our own country who has written with the greatest gusto on the subject of eating is Milton . He omits none of the pleasures of the palate , great or small . In his Latin poems , when young , he speaks of the pears and chestnuts ...
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