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 28
Page 9
... meal was an occasion for social community that transcended physical gratification . Kant delivered his early thoughts on taste in a series of lectures from 1772 to 1773 , later pub- lished as Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View ...
... meal was an occasion for social community that transcended physical gratification . Kant delivered his early thoughts on taste in a series of lectures from 1772 to 1773 , later pub- lished as Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View ...
Page 10
... meal as a symbolic system in which food is “ a highly condensed social fact , ” its significance never purely nutritional.30 The first task of the host is to exercise social discrimination ( a term now freighted with pejorative ...
... meal as a symbolic system in which food is “ a highly condensed social fact , ” its significance never purely nutritional.30 The first task of the host is to exercise social discrimination ( a term now freighted with pejorative ...
Page 20
... meal was packaged as a consumer commodity ( and an extremely complex one at that ) , a public of educated diners began to emerge , guided by gastronomical writers in English and French during the British Regency . The chapter traces ...
... meal was packaged as a consumer commodity ( and an extremely complex one at that ) , a public of educated diners began to emerge , guided by gastronomical writers in English and French during the British Regency . The chapter traces ...
Page 25
... meal . " 10 Byron jokes in Don Juan that “ all human history attests / That happiness for man , the hungry sinner , / Since Eve ate apples , much depends on dinner ” ( 13.101 ) , and his friend Shelley more seriously attributes all the ...
... meal . " 10 Byron jokes in Don Juan that “ all human history attests / That happiness for man , the hungry sinner , / Since Eve ate apples , much depends on dinner ” ( 13.101 ) , and his friend Shelley more seriously attributes all the ...
Page 28
... meal of communion in these terms would be to turn Christian sacrifice into scatology : " Materialized in the Host , God becomes a digested excrementum that is nonetheless indigestible and inedible ; the universe of spirit becomes mouse ...
... meal of communion in these terms would be to turn Christian sacrifice into scatology : " Materialized in the Host , God becomes a digested excrementum that is nonetheless indigestible and inedible ; the universe of spirit becomes mouse ...
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