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
... 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 because he has no hunger. As these works suggest, the ...
... 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 because he has no hunger. As these works suggest, the ...
Page 11
... diet , since every food had its own delicate balance of the four fundamental fluids as well.37 This idea of the animal economy as oriented around the stomach — and vulner- able to the slightest digestive malfunction — persisted in the ...
... diet , since every food had its own delicate balance of the four fundamental fluids as well.37 This idea of the animal economy as oriented around the stomach — and vulner- able to the slightest digestive malfunction — persisted in the ...
Page 14
... diet " or " natural " ( hetero ) sexuality : Why laugh at TASTE ? It is a harmless Fashion , And quite subdues each detrimental Passion ; The Fair ones Hearts will ne'er incline to Man , While thus they rage for - China and Japan.44 ...
... diet " or " natural " ( hetero ) sexuality : Why laugh at TASTE ? It is a harmless Fashion , And quite subdues each detrimental Passion ; The Fair ones Hearts will ne'er incline to Man , While thus they rage for - China and Japan.44 ...
Page 19
... diet , was an ideal of subjectivity free from the pollutants and cultural corruptions of the city . Lamb found ... dietary politics to develop his literary persona as a gas- tronomically sophisticated Londoner . Unlike the middle - class ...
... diet , was an ideal of subjectivity free from the pollutants and cultural corruptions of the city . Lamb found ... dietary politics to develop his literary persona as a gas- tronomically sophisticated Londoner . Unlike the middle - class ...
Page 21
... diet , as well as such historically feminized genres as the novel . Questions of empire have become inextricable from the politics of colonial foodstuffs , such as sugar , spice , and tea , and cultural studies have revealed the ways in ...
... diet , as well as such historically feminized genres as the novel . Questions of empire have become inextricable from the politics of colonial foodstuffs , such as sugar , spice , and tea , and cultural studies have revealed the ways in ...
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