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
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Page 7
... rhetorical project of sublimating taste from the conceptual apparatus of appetite . As Burke remarked in his 1759 “ Introduction on Taste , ” “ if Taste has no fixed principles , if the imagina- tion is not affected according to some ...
... rhetorical project of sublimating taste from the conceptual apparatus of appetite . As Burke remarked in his 1759 “ Introduction on Taste , ” “ if Taste has no fixed principles , if the imagina- tion is not affected according to some ...
Page 35
... be spewed forth in a compul- sive tautology deprived of all signification . Milton's rhetorical strategy elsewhere suggests that an effective way to demonize another is to show that person not expressing her Mortal Taste 35.
... be spewed forth in a compul- sive tautology deprived of all signification . Milton's rhetorical strategy elsewhere suggests that an effective way to demonize another is to show that person not expressing her Mortal Taste 35.
Page 36
... rhetoric that does not so much bring listeners into an audience of civilized communion as . . . shatters them into a clutch of horribly offended individ- uals . " 44 The emetic , satanic lie represents false fabrication , parodic of the ...
... rhetoric that does not so much bring listeners into an audience of civilized communion as . . . shatters them into a clutch of horribly offended individ- uals . " 44 The emetic , satanic lie represents false fabrication , parodic of the ...
Page 43
... rhetorical game , he demystifies it , stripping his antagonist of all power of illusion . He sees through his subtleties , as it were , which soon melt into air . Nevertheless , it is in Satan's nature to persist , and though ...
... rhetorical game , he demystifies it , stripping his antagonist of all power of illusion . He sees through his subtleties , as it were , which soon melt into air . Nevertheless , it is in Satan's nature to persist , and though ...
Page 51
... rhetoric and poetry " ( AN 147 ; my emphasis ) . Never merely a passive consumer of beauty , the Man of Taste exercised more than his faculty of critical discernment . He had as much to do with production as consumption . And when the ...
... rhetoric and poetry " ( AN 147 ; my emphasis ) . Never merely a passive consumer of beauty , the Man of Taste exercised more than his faculty of critical discernment . He had as much to do with production as consumption . And when the ...
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