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 36
Page
... Thomas H. D. Mahoney ( Indianapolis : Bobbs - Merrill , 1955 ) . Percy Bysshe Shelley , Shelley's Prose ; or the Trumpet of a Prophecy , ed . David Lee Clark ( London : Fourth Estate , 1988 ) . Percy Bysshe Shelley , Shelley's Poetry ...
... Thomas H. D. Mahoney ( Indianapolis : Bobbs - Merrill , 1955 ) . Percy Bysshe Shelley , Shelley's Prose ; or the Trumpet of a Prophecy , ed . David Lee Clark ( London : Fourth Estate , 1988 ) . Percy Bysshe Shelley , Shelley's Poetry ...
Page 8
... Thomas Newcomb's 1733 " The Woman of Taste " ( a gendered differential to which we shall return ) satirizes the social necessity of controlling one's appetite in public : When seated at the board you take your place , Invited by his ...
... Thomas Newcomb's 1733 " The Woman of Taste " ( a gendered differential to which we shall return ) satirizes the social necessity of controlling one's appetite in public : When seated at the board you take your place , Invited by his ...
Page 10
... Thomas Poole on March 23 , 1801 , 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 ...
... Thomas Poole on March 23 , 1801 , 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 ...
Page 11
... Thomas Willis , and other iatrochemists , eighteenth - century taste philosophers inherited the humoral model of human physiology descended from Galen : one that viewed mind and body as a psychosomatic system of four humors ( blood ...
... Thomas Willis , and other iatrochemists , eighteenth - century taste philosophers inherited the humoral model of human physiology descended from Galen : one that viewed mind and body as a psychosomatic system of four humors ( blood ...
Page 50
... Thomas Coryate's popular seventeenth - century travel narrative , Coryats Crudities : Hastily Gobled up in Five Moneths Trauells in France , Sauoy , Italy . . . Newly Digested in the Hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset ...
... Thomas Coryate's popular seventeenth - century travel narrative , Coryats Crudities : Hastily Gobled up in Five Moneths Trauells in France , Sauoy , Italy . . . Newly Digested in the Hungry aire of Odcombe in the County of Somerset ...
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