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. |
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... Society for the Study of Romanticism , and the Nineteenth - Century British Cultural Studies Working Group at the Univer- sity of California at Berkeley offered critical opportunities to work through parts of the book . I thank the ...
... Society for the Study of Romanticism , and the Nineteenth - Century British Cultural Studies Working Group at the Univer- sity of California at Berkeley offered critical opportunities to work through parts of the book . I thank the ...
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... society ) were jostling for cultural dominance . Man was an industrious animal , a culinary animal , and , more broadly , “ a social animal , ” as the philosopher William Godwin remarked in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice ( 1793 ) ...
... society ) were jostling for cultural dominance . Man was an industrious animal , a culinary animal , and , more broadly , “ a social animal , ” as the philosopher William Godwin remarked in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice ( 1793 ) ...
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... society above peer and below the gentry and nobility ; . . . the psychological and material arena in which the elections of what has been called the ' politics of significa- ... tion ' were contested . " 21 Whereas the animal Aesthetics ...
... society above peer and below the gentry and nobility ; . . . the psychological and material arena in which the elections of what has been called the ' politics of significa- ... tion ' were contested . " 21 Whereas the animal Aesthetics ...
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... society with the brawny appetite of a barbarian . To display hunger at all on such occasions is to risk disqualifying oneself from tasteful society . “ Hun- ger is the best sauce , " as Kant writes in The Critique of Judgment ( echoing ...
... society with the brawny appetite of a barbarian . To display hunger at all on such occasions is to risk disqualifying oneself from tasteful society . “ Hun- ger is the best sauce , " as Kant writes in The Critique of Judgment ( echoing ...
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... society whose middle class was increasingly upwardly mobile . " 31 In the culture of taste , food and the etiquette surrounding it were laden with meaning . The years at the end of the eighteenth century also witnessed , however ...
... society whose middle class was increasingly upwardly mobile . " 31 In the culture of taste , food and the etiquette surrounding it were laden with meaning . The years at the end of the eighteenth century also witnessed , however ...
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