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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... original minds. I wish to acknowledge a number of scholars for their perspicacity and helpful commentary at various points along the way, particularly Ian Balfour, John Bender, Terry Castle, David L. Clark, Ian Duncan, Diana Fuss, Erik ...
... original minds. I wish to acknowledge a number of scholars for their perspicacity and helpful commentary at various points along the way, particularly Ian Balfour, John Bender, Terry Castle, David L. Clark, Ian Duncan, Diana Fuss, Erik ...
Page 25
... original Hebrew this fruit is tappach , which the Vulgate translates as malum , or apple , with a pun on the short - a variant meaning bad . Some argue that “ apple ” can stand for any fleshy fruit , since only Satan calls it an apple ...
... original Hebrew this fruit is tappach , which the Vulgate translates as malum , or apple , with a pun on the short - a variant meaning bad . Some argue that “ apple ” can stand for any fleshy fruit , since only Satan calls it an apple ...
Page 27
... original unity as the Un - exchangeable divine presence sustaining this cycle of consumption , does that not destabilize the traditional view that God ( in Derrida's words ) " gives more than he promises , [ that ] he submits to no ...
... original unity as the Un - exchangeable divine presence sustaining this cycle of consumption , does that not destabilize the traditional view that God ( in Derrida's words ) " gives more than he promises , [ that ] he submits to no ...
Page 30
... original matter was not an evil thing , nor to be thought of as worthless : it was good , and it contained the seeds of all subsequent good . . . . It was in a confused and disordered state at first , but afterwards God made it ordered ...
... original matter was not an evil thing , nor to be thought of as worthless : it was good , and it contained the seeds of all subsequent good . . . . It was in a confused and disordered state at first , but afterwards God made it ordered ...
Page 37
... original sense of " taking part " in that truth , one becomes “ a member incorporate " unto the thing con- sumed . Not only is it true that as one eats one is eaten , therefore ; we may even venture to assert , on the authority of ...
... original sense of " taking part " in that truth , one becomes “ a member incorporate " unto the thing con- sumed . Not only is it true that as one eats one is eaten , therefore ; we may even venture to assert , on the authority of ...
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