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 71
Page 1
... pleasures of the palate to be the pinnacle of aesthetic appreciation . Various " committees of taste " established in early nineteenth- century Britain elevated food to the status of the fine arts , adopting the same juridical language ...
... pleasures of the palate to be the pinnacle of aesthetic appreciation . Various " committees of taste " established in early nineteenth- century Britain elevated food to the status of the fine arts , adopting the same juridical language ...
Page 2
... pleasure, and pleasure is its own way of knowing. Genealogies that trace modern aesthetic theory back through British empiricism to the mid- seventeenth-century European concern with goût and gusto skip over a source much closer to home ...
... pleasure, and pleasure is its own way of knowing. Genealogies that trace modern aesthetic theory back through British empiricism to the mid- seventeenth-century European concern with goût and gusto skip over a source much closer to home ...
Page 3
... pleasure or disgust, serving to mediate dis- crete individuals (if at all) based on bodily instinct without reference to shared ideals. Not only is taste bound up with the unruly flesh; traditionally, it is associated with too intense ...
... pleasure or disgust, serving to mediate dis- crete individuals (if at all) based on bodily instinct without reference to shared ideals. Not only is taste bound up with the unruly flesh; traditionally, it is associated with too intense ...
Page 6
... pleasure and pain apart from circumstance , and " irascible " or " invading " appetites , which were stimulated by ... pleasures and pains ; the umbrella term for this new mode of embodied cognition was taste . Anthony Ashley Cooper ...
... pleasure and pain apart from circumstance , and " irascible " or " invading " appetites , which were stimulated by ... pleasures and pains ; the umbrella term for this new mode of embodied cognition was taste . Anthony Ashley Cooper ...
Page 8
... pleasures of eating demand ap- petite , the sociocultural " politics of signification " rule the table , where one sits ... pleasure you cou'd eat.22 These lines express a precept still in effect today : one does not sit down in polite ...
... pleasures of eating demand ap- petite , the sociocultural " politics of signification " rule the table , where one sits ... pleasure you cou'd eat.22 These lines express a precept still in effect today : one does not sit down in polite ...
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