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. |
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Page 2
... Keats's experience of epic nausea. Confronting the metaphor of consumption in the field of representation, as this book will show, these writers perform their own critique of the Romantic ideology (conceived as a 2 Aesthetics and Appetite.
... Keats's experience of epic nausea. Confronting the metaphor of consumption in the field of representation, as this book will show, these writers perform their own critique of the Romantic ideology (conceived as a 2 Aesthetics and Appetite.
Page 3
... 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 through the exercise of discrimination.∂ An overdetermined, multivalenced ...
... 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 through the exercise of discrimination.∂ An overdetermined, multivalenced ...
Page 10
... consumption , neither the rich ( whose palates were symbolically vitiated by overindulgence ) nor the poor ( whose objective was merely to eat ) contributed representative members to tasteful society . ... The Physiology of Taste ...
... consumption , neither the rich ( whose palates were symbolically vitiated by overindulgence ) nor the poor ( whose objective was merely to eat ) contributed representative members to tasteful society . ... The Physiology of Taste ...
Page 15
... consumption of women , along with the shopping , exhibition , and other types of female consumerism that fed into the story . To top it off , the novel contained frequent scenes with food , and writers as diverse as Mary Wollstonecraft ...
... consumption of women , along with the shopping , exhibition , and other types of female consumerism that fed into the story . To top it off , the novel contained frequent scenes with food , and writers as diverse as Mary Wollstonecraft ...
Page 17
... a fictional world that anticipates and renders visible the philosophical construction of taste as a symbolic econ- omy of consumption . As Paradise Lost and Regained make clear , the discrimination Aesthetics and Appetite 17.
... a fictional world that anticipates and renders visible the philosophical construction of taste as a symbolic econ- omy of consumption . As Paradise Lost and Regained make clear , the discrimination Aesthetics and Appetite 17.
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