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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Page xi
... Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958). PL/PR John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957); poetry is cited PL for Paradise Lost; PR ...
... Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958). PL/PR John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957); poetry is cited PL for Paradise Lost; PR ...
Page 17
... sublime tradition in England, and as W. J. Bate observes: ''The neo-classic 'School of Taste' in England both facilitated and in turn drew encouragement from the rising popularity of the famous Greek treatise, attributed to Longinus, On ...
... sublime tradition in England, and as W. J. Bate observes: ''The neo-classic 'School of Taste' in England both facilitated and in turn drew encouragement from the rising popularity of the famous Greek treatise, attributed to Longinus, On ...
Page 24
... sublime, the beautiful, and all the other pleasing illusions that were to shape and sustain individual and communal identity in civil society. In a brilliant fictional cosmology of eating, Milton's God, or the divine Word of ...
... sublime, the beautiful, and all the other pleasing illusions that were to shape and sustain individual and communal identity in civil society. In a brilliant fictional cosmology of eating, Milton's God, or the divine Word of ...
Page 28
... sublime pleasure to be discerned as Milton describes the process of exclusion? The experience of sublimity involves a ''negative pleasure'' in which, as Kant writes, ''the mind is not simply attracted by the object but is also ...
... sublime pleasure to be discerned as Milton describes the process of exclusion? The experience of sublimity involves a ''negative pleasure'' in which, as Kant writes, ''the mind is not simply attracted by the object but is also ...
Page 29
... sublime, primordial expulsion as the founding gesture of creation. In this act the ''dregs'' of creation are forever purged from the symbolic world of tasteful circulation: the Spirit of God outspread, And vital virtue infus'd, and ...
... sublime, primordial expulsion as the founding gesture of creation. In this act the ''dregs'' of creation are forever purged from the symbolic world of tasteful circulation: the Spirit of God outspread, And vital virtue infus'd, and ...
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 animal appeared appetite arts beauty become body bread British Byron called Cambridge cannibalism century Charles civilizing claims Coleridge considered consumer consumption critical cultural describes diet digestion discourse early economy Elia England English Essay existence experience expression feast feeding figure find first flesh French gastronomical George give gourmand Guide human hunger Hyperion ideal imagination John Juan Keats Keats’s Lakes Lamb Lamb’s letter lines literary living London manner material matter meal means metaphor Milton mind moral nature object organ original Oxford palate Paradise Lost person philosophical physical pleasure poem poet poetry political production reference relation rhetoric Roast Romantic Satan sense Shaftesbury smell social society stomach Studies sublime suggests symbolic taste term theory things Thomas tion trans turn University Press vols Wordsworth writes York