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
... 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 been missed ...
... 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 been missed ...
Page 3
... smell, is bound up with the chemical physiology of the body. The two are thought to convey immediate pleasure or disgust, serving to mediate dis- crete individuals (if at all) based on bodily instinct without reference to shared ideals ...
... smell, is bound up with the chemical physiology of the body. The two are thought to convey immediate pleasure or disgust, serving to mediate dis- crete individuals (if at all) based on bodily instinct without reference to shared ideals ...
Page 12
... smell , and touch in the Romantic period presided over the production of tasteful subjects . Before modern medicine made probing beyond the subjective border of skin a less problematic venture , physicians relied on what was evacuated ...
... smell , and touch in the Romantic period presided over the production of tasteful subjects . Before modern medicine made probing beyond the subjective border of skin a less problematic venture , physicians relied on what was evacuated ...
Page 15
... smell and taste produce no mental activity , and for Aristotle , therefore , “ the arts of the perfumer and cook are the arts of pleasure . " 48 His hierarchy ranked visual arts , music , and poetry at the top ; cookery and other ...
... smell and taste produce no mental activity , and for Aristotle , therefore , “ the arts of the perfumer and cook are the arts of pleasure . " 48 His hierarchy ranked visual arts , music , and poetry at the top ; cookery and other ...
Page 16
... smell demand an actual self engaged in the world of material presence . Coleridge for one stressed the role of “ all tangible ideas & sensations " in forming the “ real Self , ” for to create one's " own self in a field of Vision ...
... smell demand an actual self engaged in the world of material presence . Coleridge for one stressed the role of “ all tangible ideas & sensations " in forming the “ real Self , ” for to create one's " own self in a field of Vision ...
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