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 44
Page 2
... 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 Christ resists the luscious feasts of ...
... 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 Christ resists the luscious feasts of ...
Page 3
... Consumer Revolution as well. Unlike the social structures of production, consumption is considered a matter of individual choice, and the so-called Man of Taste had to navigate an increasing tide of consumables, seeking distinction ...
... Consumer Revolution as well. Unlike the social structures of production, consumption is considered a matter of individual choice, and the so-called Man of Taste had to navigate an increasing tide of consumables, seeking distinction ...
Page 7
... consumer goods was among them.20 Lance Bertelsen defines the eighteenth - century term middling as “ that protean segment of society above peer and below the gentry and nobility ; . . . the psychological and material arena in which the ...
... consumer goods was among them.20 Lance Bertelsen defines the eighteenth - century term middling as “ that protean segment of society above peer and below the gentry and nobility ; . . . the psychological and material arena in which the ...
Page 9
... consumer . “ I , " Johnson bragged , “ who live at a variety of good tables , am a much better judge of cookery , than any person who has a very tolerable cook , but lives much at home ; for his palate is gradually adapted to the taste ...
... consumer . “ I , " Johnson bragged , “ who live at a variety of good tables , am a much better judge of cookery , than any person who has a very tolerable cook , but lives much at home ; for his palate is gradually adapted to the taste ...
Page 14
... consumer , navigating the middle - class divide between aesthetic taste and material desires . David Garrick's prologue to Samuel Foote's 1752 comedy Taste suggests how the civilizing progress from necessity to luxury was also conceived ...
... consumer , navigating the middle - class divide between aesthetic taste and material desires . David Garrick's prologue to Samuel Foote's 1752 comedy Taste suggests how the civilizing progress from necessity to luxury was also conceived ...
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