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 19
Page 5
... existence in civil society ) were jostling for cultural dominance . Man was an industrious animal , a culinary animal , and , more broadly , “ a social animal , ” as the philosopher William Godwin remarked in An Enquiry Concerning ...
... existence in civil society ) were jostling for cultural dominance . Man was an industrious animal , a culinary animal , and , more broadly , “ a social animal , ” as the philosopher William Godwin remarked in An Enquiry Concerning ...
Page 20
... existence that will not be idealized away . In order to explain how Keats's effort to relish the world with gusto results in his existentialist vision in the Hyperion poems , the chapter shows how he develops a theory of aesthetic ...
... existence that will not be idealized away . In order to explain how Keats's effort to relish the world with gusto results in his existentialist vision in the Hyperion poems , the chapter shows how he develops a theory of aesthetic ...
Page 27
... existence ) on flesh , what happens when one instead ingests a vacuity , which installs itself at the constitutive center of self like a gap perpetually craving the presence of real flesh ? Such questions can best be approached from ...
... existence ) on flesh , what happens when one instead ingests a vacuity , which installs itself at the constitutive center of self like a gap perpetually craving the presence of real flesh ? Such questions can best be approached from ...
Page 31
... existence of heaven or earth , cast into " a place of utter darkness , fitliest called Chaos . " This subtle confusion between “ utter darkness ” ( or hell ) and Chaos in what is otherwise a highly articulated universe suggests that the ...
... existence of heaven or earth , cast into " a place of utter darkness , fitliest called Chaos . " This subtle confusion between “ utter darkness ” ( or hell ) and Chaos in what is otherwise a highly articulated universe suggests that the ...
Page 49
... existence in society . Backing this philosophical idealism was a political idealism : the Whiggish faith , inherited from his grandfather the first earl , that all citizens are relatively equal , interdependent members of the body ...
... existence in society . Backing this philosophical idealism was a political idealism : the Whiggish faith , inherited from his grandfather the first earl , that all citizens are relatively equal , interdependent members of the body ...
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