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
... feeding (and digesting) mind, to 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 ...
... feeding (and digesting) mind, to 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 ...
Page 3
... fed by consumer culture. Romantic writers deployed the gustatory metaphor of taste in the full awareness that by this point in the extended culture of taste, its subsets were not only taste and appetite but also a commingled version of ...
... fed by consumer culture. Romantic writers deployed the gustatory metaphor of taste in the full awareness that by this point in the extended culture of taste, its subsets were not only taste and appetite but also a commingled version of ...
Page 15
... fed into the story. To top it off, the novel contained frequent scenes with food, and writers as diverse as Mary Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth expressed frustration with its seeming capacity to stimulate the passions. Wollstonecraft ...
... fed into the story. To top it off, the novel contained frequent scenes with food, and writers as diverse as Mary Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth expressed frustration with its seeming capacity to stimulate the passions. Wollstonecraft ...
Page 18
... feeding source in the literary history of taste for confirmation of its ontological power, while Lamb deploys the cultural politics of flesh-eating to describe a masochistic countervision of low-urban taste. Byron uses cannibalism to ...
... feeding source in the literary history of taste for confirmation of its ontological power, while Lamb deploys the cultural politics of flesh-eating to describe a masochistic countervision of low-urban taste. Byron uses cannibalism to ...
Page 19
... feeding mind directly onto the material ecology of the Lakes. Later, his two letters addressed to the Morning Post in December 1844 protest the ''rash assault'' of the English railway into the Lake District and encourage ''all persons ...
... feeding mind directly onto the material ecology of the Lakes. Later, his two letters addressed to the Morning Post in December 1844 protest the ''rash assault'' of the English railway into the Lake District and encourage ''all persons ...
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 animal appeared appetite arts beauty become body bread British Byron called Cambridge cannibalism century Charles civilizing claims Coleridge considered consumer consumption critical cultural describes diet digestion discourse early economy Elia England English Essay existence experience expression feast feeding figure find first flesh French gastronomical George give gourmand Guide human hunger Hyperion ideal imagination John Juan Keats Keats’s Lakes Lamb Lamb’s letter lines literary living London manner material matter meal means metaphor Milton mind moral nature object organ original Oxford palate Paradise Lost person philosophical physical pleasure poem poet poetry political production reference relation rhetoric Roast Romantic Satan sense Shaftesbury smell social society stomach Studies sublime suggests symbolic taste term theory things Thomas tion trans turn University Press vols Wordsworth writes York