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 53
Page 1
... sense of smell appreciates it as it passes the nasal channel , and it is pulled down into the stomach to be submitted to sundry baser transfor- mations without , in this whole metamorphosis , a single atom or drop or particle having ...
... sense of smell appreciates it as it passes the nasal channel , and it is pulled down into the stomach to be submitted to sundry baser transfor- mations without , in this whole metamorphosis , a single atom or drop or particle having ...
Page 2
... sense of self. Unlike classical aesthetics, which were primarily linked to the higher senses of sight and hearing, modern aesthetics as evolved from the concept of taste involves pleasure, and pleasure is its own way of knowing ...
... sense of self. Unlike classical aesthetics, which were primarily linked to the higher senses of sight and hearing, modern aesthetics as evolved from the concept of taste involves pleasure, and pleasure is its own way of knowing ...
Page 3
... senses as a means of ingress to the mind.∑ Whereas sight and hearing allow for a proper representative distance ... senses theoretically leads to more mind, the exercise of the lower senses of taste and smell can result in too much body ...
... senses as a means of ingress to the mind.∑ Whereas sight and hearing allow for a proper representative distance ... senses theoretically leads to more mind, the exercise of the lower senses of taste and smell can result in too much body ...
Page 4
... senses , which were themselves highly unreliable . How could one tell , for instance , whether the sense impressions conveyed to the mind were an accurate representation of the world outside ? The result was a highly unstable human ...
... senses , which were themselves highly unreliable . How could one tell , for instance , whether the sense impressions conveyed to the mind were an accurate representation of the world outside ? The result was a highly unstable human ...
Page 5
... sense , the Enlightenment culture of taste was a reaction against Hobbes's “ Leviathan , ” depicted in the 1651 frontispiece to the work of that title as a gigantic human torso crammed full of tiny anony- mous citizens and presided over ...
... sense , the Enlightenment culture of taste was a reaction against Hobbes's “ Leviathan , ” depicted in the 1651 frontispiece to the work of that title as a gigantic human torso crammed full of tiny anony- mous citizens and presided over ...
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