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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... things helped to raise our beautiful boy Julian Rovee during the first three years of his life , should go without saying but will not go unrecorded here . Abbreviations AN BLJ C CCL CCW CDP CJ Immanuel Kant, viii Acknowledgments.
... things helped to raise our beautiful boy Julian Rovee during the first three years of his life , should go without saying but will not go unrecorded here . Abbreviations AN BLJ C CCL CCW CDP CJ Immanuel Kant, viii Acknowledgments.
Page 2
... things'' (SPP 482), and most theorists of metaphor agree that rather than operating by reference to external reality or truth, it has a ''world-generating'' capacity.≥ Writers in the literary history of taste wield the gustatory ...
... things'' (SPP 482), and most theorists of metaphor agree that rather than operating by reference to external reality or truth, it has a ''world-generating'' capacity.≥ Writers in the literary history of taste wield the gustatory ...
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... thing he calls identity . Rather , the metaphysical question of what it means to be human - or more than an assemblage of animal anatomy - was a bone he tossed to the theologians or " those , who have better thought of that matter . " 7 ...
... thing he calls identity . Rather , the metaphysical question of what it means to be human - or more than an assemblage of animal anatomy - was a bone he tossed to the theologians or " those , who have better thought of that matter . " 7 ...
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... things to move according to their nature , " and " Sensitive or Animal Appetite was the power which controlled the vital functions common to man and beast , such as breathing , digestion and the circulation of the blood . " 13 However ...
... things to move according to their nature , " and " Sensitive or Animal Appetite was the power which controlled the vital functions common to man and beast , such as breathing , digestion and the circulation of the blood . " 13 However ...
Page 13
... things is determined by it ? ” ( AN 144 ) . What Kant faced was the difficulty of proceeding philosophically ... thing as indifferent as a taste for rope - dancing , or Frontiniac or Sherry " ( PW 1 : 139 ) . The analogy to food or drink ...
... things is determined by it ? ” ( AN 144 ) . What Kant faced was the difficulty of proceeding philosophically ... thing as indifferent as a taste for rope - dancing , or Frontiniac or Sherry " ( PW 1 : 139 ) . The analogy to food or drink ...
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