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 2
... turning the fruit into more than a common apple, or dietary container of nutriments. Eve does not give into temptation to taste the fruit because she is hungry, any more than Christ resists the luscious feasts of Paradise Regained ...
... turning the fruit into more than a common apple, or dietary container of nutriments. Eve does not give into temptation to taste the fruit because she is hungry, any more than Christ resists the luscious feasts of Paradise Regained ...
Page 3
... turn of the nineteenth century, the dialectical counterpart to taste was not only bodily appetite but also the wider sphere of material desires fed by consumer culture. Romantic writers deployed the gustatory metaphor of taste in the ...
... turn of the nineteenth century, the dialectical counterpart to taste was not only bodily appetite but also the wider sphere of material desires fed by consumer culture. Romantic writers deployed the gustatory metaphor of taste in the ...
Page 17
... turn drew encouragement from the rising popularity of the famous Greek treatise, attributed to Longinus, On the Sublime.''∏≤ On the verge of the eighteenth-century effort to repress, sublimate, or otherwise discipline appetite into ...
... turn drew encouragement from the rising popularity of the famous Greek treatise, attributed to Longinus, On the Sublime.''∏≤ On the verge of the eighteenth-century effort to repress, sublimate, or otherwise discipline appetite into ...
Page 18
... turn of the century had become respectable members of civil society and even leaders in public taste under the appellation of the gastronome. In these years gastronomy emerged as a distinct literary genre—witty, eclectic as table talk ...
... turn of the century had become respectable members of civil society and even leaders in public taste under the appellation of the gastronome. In these years gastronomy emerged as a distinct literary genre—witty, eclectic as table talk ...
Page 27
... turning the Lord's Supper into a cannibal feast'' (YP 6:554). For Milton, ''Consubstantia- tion and particularly transubstantiation . . . or cannibalism are utterly alien to reason, common sense and human behavior'' (YP 6:554). Of ...
... turning the Lord's Supper into a cannibal feast'' (YP 6:554). For Milton, ''Consubstantia- tion and particularly transubstantiation . . . or cannibalism are utterly alien to reason, common sense and human behavior'' (YP 6:554). 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