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 30
Page 2
... relation to the concept of taste. Taste, call it gustus, gusto, or goût (the Continent, after all, got there before ... relations of things'' (SPP 482), and most theorists of metaphor agree that rather than operating by reference to ...
... relation to the concept of taste. Taste, call it gustus, gusto, or goût (the Continent, after all, got there before ... relations of things'' (SPP 482), and most theorists of metaphor agree that rather than operating by reference to ...
Page 3
... relations between aesthetic taste and the more substantial phenomena of appetite. The Philosophy of Taste Taste has always ranked low on the philosophical hierarchy of the senses as a means of ingress to the mind.∑ Whereas sight and ...
... relations between aesthetic taste and the more substantial phenomena of appetite. The Philosophy of Taste Taste has always ranked low on the philosophical hierarchy of the senses as a means of ingress to the mind.∑ Whereas sight and ...
Page 4
... relation of this soul to matter , or of the soul to mind , or to the thing he calls identity . Rather , the metaphysical question of what it means to be human - or more than an assemblage of animal anatomy - was a bone he tossed to the ...
... relation of this soul to matter , or of the soul to mind , or to the thing he calls identity . Rather , the metaphysical question of what it means to be human - or more than an assemblage of animal anatomy - was a bone he tossed to the ...
Page 9
... relation to aesthetics.29 The meal is a materialized version of the sensus communis , further elaborated in The Critique of Judgment as an intersubjec- tive community united in a shared ideal through the faculty of representation . Food ...
... relation to aesthetics.29 The meal is a materialized version of the sensus communis , further elaborated in The Critique of Judgment as an intersubjec- tive community united in a shared ideal through the faculty of representation . Food ...
Page 44
... relation stands ; All men are Sons of God . . . . ( PR 4.517–20 ) Satan is supplemental to the Son , if we define the term as " a surplus , a pleni- tude enriching another plenitude , the fullest measure of presence , ” in Derrida's ...
... relation stands ; All men are Sons of God . . . . ( PR 4.517–20 ) Satan is supplemental to the Son , if we define the term as " a surplus , a pleni- tude enriching another plenitude , the fullest measure of presence , ” in Derrida's ...
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 |
Other editions - View all
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