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 2
... theory back through British empiricism to the mid- seventeenth-century European concern with goût and gusto skip over a source much closer to home. For at roughly the same time that ''taste'' was gaining currency as a term for 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. For at roughly the same time that ''taste'' was gaining currency as a term for aesthetic ...
Page 20
... theory of aesthetic experience as an allegory of taste , based on Milton . From the heights of transcendental poetry , chapter 8 descends to the set piece of the Victorian novel , the middle - class dinner party and its concomitant aes ...
... theory of aesthetic experience as an allegory of taste , based on Milton . From the heights of transcendental poetry , chapter 8 descends to the set piece of the Victorian novel , the middle - class dinner party and its concomitant aes ...
Page 23
... theory in the early years of the eighteenth century . Milton was not the first to use the term taste in its metaphorical capacity to indicate mental discrimination , but he narrates the tale of " mortal taste " an- nounced in the second ...
... theory in the early years of the eighteenth century . Milton was not the first to use the term taste in its metaphorical capacity to indicate mental discrimination , but he narrates the tale of " mortal taste " an- nounced in the second ...
Page 25
... theory from Kant to Hegel , Marx , Nietzsche , Freud , Bataille , and many others demonstrates that the metaphors of ... theories of economy suggest that nutrients like wealth must be processed efficiently in order for the individual or ...
... theory from Kant to Hegel , Marx , Nietzsche , Freud , Bataille , and many others demonstrates that the metaphors of ... theories of economy suggest that nutrients like wealth must be processed efficiently in order for the individual or ...
Page 29
... theory . ― In book 7 of Paradise Lost , Milton depicts a sublime , primordial expulsion as the founding gesture of creation . In this act the “ dregs ” of creation are forever purged from the symbolic world of tasteful circulation : the ...
... theory . ― In book 7 of Paradise Lost , Milton depicts a sublime , primordial expulsion as the founding gesture of creation . In this act the “ dregs ” of creation are forever purged from the symbolic world of tasteful circulation : 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