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
Results 1-5 of 42
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... Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn. 14 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–98). Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato; including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and ...
... Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn. 14 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–98). Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato; including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and ...
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... Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn. 5 vols.; each in 2 vols.: 1 text, 2 notes (London: Routledge, 2002). William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman. 2d ed ...
... Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn. 5 vols.; each in 2 vols.: 1 text, 2 notes (London: Routledge, 2002). William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman. 2d ed ...
Page 10
... Coleridge complained : " I am oppressed at times with a true heart - gnawing melancholy when I contemplate the state of my poor oppressed Country . — God knows , it is as much as I can do to put meat and bread on my own table ; & hourly ...
... Coleridge complained : " I am oppressed at times with a true heart - gnawing melancholy when I contemplate the state of my poor oppressed Country . — God knows , it is as much as I can do to put meat and bread on my own table ; & hourly ...
Page 12
... Coleridge , the “ lower ” fac- ulties , such as the “ Olfactories , Gustatories , and organ of the Skin , " carried on the work of touch in order to " assimilate or transform the external into the personal , or combine them thus ...
... Coleridge , the “ lower ” fac- ulties , such as the “ Olfactories , Gustatories , and organ of the Skin , " carried on the work of touch in order to " assimilate or transform the external into the personal , or combine them thus ...
Page 13
... Coleridge complained that it had gone too far : “ One man may say I delight in Milton and Shakespeare more than Turtle or Venison another man that is not my case for myself I think a good dish of turtle and a good bottle of port ...
... Coleridge complained that it had gone too far : “ One man may say I delight in Milton and Shakespeare more than Turtle or Venison another man that is not my case for myself I think a good dish of turtle and a good bottle of port ...
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