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 31
Page 2
... metaphor for a kind of pleasure that does not submit to objective laws: de gustibus non est disputandum; chacun à son goût; sobre los gustos, no hai disputa; or, there is no disputing about taste. While most ac- counts of aesthetic ...
... metaphor for a kind of pleasure that does not submit to objective laws: de gustibus non est disputandum; chacun à son goût; sobre los gustos, no hai disputa; or, there is no disputing about taste. While most ac- counts of aesthetic ...
Page 3
... metaphor, and it is time for literary history to examine rigorously its related subsets of taste and appetite. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the dialectical counterpart to taste was not only bodily appetite but also the wider ...
... metaphor, and it is time for literary history to examine rigorously its related subsets of taste and appetite. By the turn of the nineteenth century, the dialectical counterpart to taste was not only bodily appetite but also the wider ...
Page 6
... metaphorical motion . The Enlight- enment culture of taste , by contrast , would train this appetite into a metaphori- cal endeavor - a taste for this or that . By the eighteenth century , physicality provided access to cognitive dimen ...
... metaphorical motion . The Enlight- enment culture of taste , by contrast , would train this appetite into a metaphori- cal endeavor - a taste for this or that . By the eighteenth century , physicality provided access to cognitive dimen ...
Page 16
... metaphor mainly in poetry and nonnovelistic prose , should also make these critical issues in the history of the novel accessi- ble through writers who have typically been considered outside it . The Metaphor of Taste The aesthetic ...
... metaphor mainly in poetry and nonnovelistic prose , should also make these critical issues in the history of the novel accessi- ble through writers who have typically been considered outside it . The Metaphor of Taste The aesthetic ...
Page 17
... metaphorical use of the word ' taste ' to designate the discern- ment of beauty and flaws in all the arts . ” 59 More recently , Remy G. Saisselin claims that in mid seventeenth - century France , the je ne sais quoi came to stand for ...
... metaphorical use of the word ' taste ' to designate the discern- ment of beauty and flaws in all the arts . ” 59 More recently , Remy G. Saisselin claims that in mid seventeenth - century France , the je ne sais quoi came to stand for ...
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