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
... give into temptation to taste the fruit because she is hungry, any more than Christ resists the luscious feasts of Paradise Regained because he has no hunger. As these works suggest, the Miltonic fall involves more than epistemological ...
... give into temptation to taste the fruit because she is hungry, any more than Christ resists the luscious feasts of Paradise Regained because he has no hunger. As these works suggest, the Miltonic fall involves more than epistemological ...
Page 8
... gives no indication of taste having anything to say to the choice . Only when men have got all they want can we tell who ... give a show of avoiding ) all interest in food.25 In an issue of The Rambler ( no . 206 8 Aesthetics and Appetite.
... gives no indication of taste having anything to say to the choice . Only when men have got all they want can we tell who ... give a show of avoiding ) all interest in food.25 In an issue of The Rambler ( no . 206 8 Aesthetics and Appetite.
Page 13
... give me much more delight than I receive from Milton and Shake- speare you must not dispute about tastes " ( CCW 8.2 : 668-70 ) . The problem with the gustatory trope is that it made room for pleasure in aesthetic experi- ence only at ...
... give me much more delight than I receive from Milton and Shake- speare you must not dispute about tastes " ( CCW 8.2 : 668-70 ) . The problem with the gustatory trope is that it made room for pleasure in aesthetic experi- ence only at ...
Page 14
... give in to the dangerous pleasures of appetite was to edge oneself closer to the cultural construction of effeminacy . Although the British Man of Taste was gendered male , he asserted himself ( in practice at least ) as a consumer ...
... give in to the dangerous pleasures of appetite was to edge oneself closer to the cultural construction of effeminacy . Although the British Man of Taste was gendered male , he asserted himself ( in practice at least ) as a consumer ...
Page 15
... gives a private or eleemosynary treat , but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary , at which all persons are welcome for their money . ” In the former case , “ good - breeding forces them to approve and to commend whatever is set ...
... gives a private or eleemosynary treat , but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary , at which all persons are welcome for their money . ” In the former case , “ good - breeding forces them to approve and to commend whatever is set ...
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