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 5
... Taste.12 Combined with an evolving etiquette and a social imperative for commensality , dining in civilized society involved a range of food preferences through which the individual could establish claims to dis- tinction . Romantic ...
... Taste.12 Combined with an evolving etiquette and a social imperative for commensality , dining in civilized society involved a range of food preferences through which the individual could establish claims to dis- tinction . Romantic ...
Page 8
... Taste " ( a gendered differential to which we shall return ) satirizes the social necessity of controlling one's ... taste having anything to say to the choice . Only when men have got all they want can we tell who among the crowd has ...
... Taste " ( a gendered differential to which we shall return ) satirizes the social necessity of controlling one's ... taste having anything to say to the choice . Only when men have got all they want can we tell who among the crowd has ...
Page 10
... taste , food and the etiquette surrounding it were laden with meaning . The years at the end of the eighteenth century also witnessed , however , extremities of appetite- starvation and aristocratic feasting - that did not conduce to ...
... taste , food and the etiquette surrounding it were laden with meaning . The years at the end of the eighteenth century also witnessed , however , extremities of appetite- starvation and aristocratic feasting - that did not conduce to ...
Page 13
... taste philosophers who judged the person of taste by what he or she expressed in the form of discourse or poetry . Even Kant , who dismissed the tradition of British empiricism as philosophi- cally unsound , began his lectures on taste ...
... taste philosophers who judged the person of taste by what he or she expressed in the form of discourse or poetry . Even Kant , who dismissed the tradition of British empiricism as philosophi- cally unsound , began his lectures on taste ...
Page 15
... Taste " offer a critical lens on the eighteenth - century culture of taste and its defining fiction : the Man of Taste as a universal symbol for the self in society . Following the philosophical hierarchy of the senses was the hierarchy ...
... Taste " offer a critical lens on the eighteenth - century culture of taste and its defining fiction : the Man of Taste as a universal symbol for the self in society . Following the philosophical hierarchy of the senses was the hierarchy ...
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