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 2
... suggest, the Miltonic fall involves more than epistemological or moral errors of judgment: it also involves a kind of judgment inextricable from pleasure. That taste involves pleasure is a lesson the Romantics learn from Milton and that ...
... suggest, the Miltonic fall involves more than epistemological or moral errors of judgment: it also involves a kind of judgment inextricable from pleasure. That taste involves pleasure is a lesson the Romantics learn from Milton and that ...
Page 13
... suggests that the maxim ''De gustibus non est dispu- tandum'' did not apply to aesthetics. Bodily taste may be tied to the fleshy organ of the tongue, its sensory ''tentacles'' or ''papillae,'' but mental taste conceived of as a feeling ...
... suggests that the maxim ''De gustibus non est dispu- tandum'' did not apply to aesthetics. Bodily taste may be tied to the fleshy organ of the tongue, its sensory ''tentacles'' or ''papillae,'' but mental taste conceived of as a feeling ...
Page 14
... suggests how the civilizing progress from necessity to luxury was also conceived of as a trajectory away from instinctual desire, whether coded as ''natural diet'' or ''natural'' (hetero)sexuality: Why laugh at taste? It is a harmless ...
... suggests how the civilizing progress from necessity to luxury was also conceived of as a trajectory away from instinctual desire, whether coded as ''natural diet'' or ''natural'' (hetero)sexuality: Why laugh at taste? It is a harmless ...
Page 17
... suggests the degree to which sensory pleasure had begun to define aesthetic experience. Just as the virtuosi of seventeenth-century Europe sought virtue and knowledge through empirical testing, Milton's Eve paves the way for the ...
... suggests the degree to which sensory pleasure had begun to define aesthetic experience. Just as the virtuosi of seventeenth-century Europe sought virtue and knowledge through empirical testing, Milton's Eve paves the way for the ...
Page 19
... suggest the degree to which the poet's extraordinary ambitions for taste (whereby ''the taste, intellectual Power, and morals of a Country are inseparably linked in mutual dependence'') come face to face with contending forces of ...
... suggest the degree to which the poet's extraordinary ambitions for taste (whereby ''the taste, intellectual Power, and morals of a Country are inseparably linked in mutual dependence'') come face to face with contending forces of ...
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