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 29
Page 3
... called Man of Taste had to navigate an increasing tide of consumables, seeking distinction through the exercise of discrimination.∂ An overdetermined, multivalenced concept, consumption is grounded in the power of metaphor, and it is ...
... called Man of Taste had to navigate an increasing tide of consumables, seeking distinction through the exercise of discrimination.∂ An overdetermined, multivalenced concept, consumption is grounded in the power of metaphor, and it is ...
Page 5
... called cuisines : " Hu- mans are virtually the only creatures in the world that observe rules about what is eaten , how it is prepared , and with whom it is to be eaten . The only other animals that do anything remotely approximate are ...
... called cuisines : " Hu- mans are virtually the only creatures in the world that observe rules about what is eaten , how it is prepared , and with whom it is to be eaten . The only other animals that do anything remotely approximate are ...
Page 6
... called APPETITE , or DESIRE ; the later , being the generall name ; and the other , often - times restrayned to signifie the Desire of Food , namely Hunger and Thirst " ; by contrast , “ when the Endeavour is fromward something , it is ...
... called APPETITE , or DESIRE ; the later , being the generall name ; and the other , often - times restrayned to signifie the Desire of Food , namely Hunger and Thirst " ; by contrast , “ when the Endeavour is fromward something , it is ...
Page 7
... gentry and nobility ; . . . the psychological and material arena in which the elections of what has been called the ' politics of significa- ... tion ' were contested . " 21 Whereas the animal Aesthetics and Appetite 7.
... gentry and nobility ; . . . the psychological and material arena in which the elections of what has been called the ' politics of significa- ... tion ' were contested . " 21 Whereas the animal Aesthetics and Appetite 7.
Page 10
... called festive entertainments ( feasting and gorging ) , ” Kant says of aristocratic excess , are incommensurate with middle - class ideals of politeness and by the 1790s are “ pretty much in bad taste ” ( AN 187 ) . Writing to his ...
... called festive entertainments ( feasting and gorging ) , ” Kant says of aristocratic excess , are incommensurate with middle - class ideals of politeness and by the 1790s are “ pretty much in bad taste ” ( AN 187 ) . Writing to his ...
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 |
Other editions - View all
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