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 22
Page 2
... Satan conjures ap- petite, manipulating consumer desire and 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 ...
... Satan conjures ap- petite, manipulating consumer desire and 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 ...
Page 23
... Satan as " precious of all Trees / In Paradise , of operation blest / To Sapience ” ( PL 1.2 , 9.795–97 ) . It contains " sciential sap , ” and when Adam calls Eve “ exact of taste , ” he adds , " of Sapience no small part " ( PL 9.838 ...
... Satan as " precious of all Trees / In Paradise , of operation blest / To Sapience ” ( PL 1.2 , 9.795–97 ) . It contains " sciential sap , ” and when Adam calls Eve “ exact of taste , ” he adds , " of Sapience no small part " ( PL 9.838 ...
Page 24
... Satan , she reflects , “ He pluckt , he tasted ” ( PL 5.65 ) . This ambiguity between eating and tasting signals the tension between physiological and philosophical taste bound up in Milton's gustatory trope . The objection will be ...
... Satan , she reflects , “ He pluckt , he tasted ” ( PL 5.65 ) . This ambiguity between eating and tasting signals the tension between physiological and philosophical taste bound up in Milton's gustatory trope . The objection will be ...
Page 25
... Satan calls it an apple , thereby reducing it to its lowest com- mon denominator.7 Karen L. Edwards suggests that in the context of contem- porary experimental science the naming of botanical species is important , because to misname is ...
... Satan calls it an apple , thereby reducing it to its lowest com- mon denominator.7 Karen L. Edwards suggests that in the context of contem- porary experimental science the naming of botanical species is important , because to misname is ...
Page 31
... Satan himself recognizes that within the cosmology of Paradise Lost he represents inassimilable waste , or the black cosmic matter called dregs : “ myself am Hell ” ( PL 4.75 ) .33 Similarly , when Adam aligns him- self with the ...
... Satan himself recognizes that within the cosmology of Paradise Lost he represents inassimilable waste , or the black cosmic matter called dregs : “ myself am Hell ” ( PL 4.75 ) .33 Similarly , when Adam aligns him- self with the ...
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