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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Page 7
... tion is not affected according to some invariable and certain laws ... it must be judged an useless , if not an absurd undertaking , to lay down rules for caprice , and to set up for a legislator of whims and fancies " ( PE 12 ) ...
... tion is not affected according to some invariable and certain laws ... it must be judged an useless , if not an absurd undertaking , to lay down rules for caprice , and to set up for a legislator of whims and fancies " ( PE 12 ) ...
Page 8
A Literary History Denise Gigante. tion ' were contested . " 21 Whereas the animal pleasures of eating demand ap- petite , the sociocultural " politics of signification " rule the table , where one sits down to eat without it , or at ...
A Literary History Denise Gigante. tion ' were contested . " 21 Whereas the animal pleasures of eating demand ap- petite , the sociocultural " politics of signification " rule the table , where one sits down to eat without it , or at ...
Page 12
... tion . . . exists , what cannot be affirmed of any other viscus , in perhaps all animals without exception ; and , if the importance of parts may be estimated in this way , evidently holds the first rank among our organs . " 40 As ...
... tion . . . exists , what cannot be affirmed of any other viscus , in perhaps all animals without exception ; and , if the importance of parts may be estimated in this way , evidently holds the first rank among our organs . " 40 As ...
Page 18
... tion . For Milton's digesting God , as for the ruminating Spirit of German Roman- ticism and Wordsworth's creatively feeding mind , creation entails more than the airy intake of inspiration . Chapter 4 shows how Wordsworth's lifelong ...
... tion . For Milton's digesting God , as for the ruminating Spirit of German Roman- ticism and Wordsworth's creatively feeding mind , creation entails more than the airy intake of inspiration . Chapter 4 shows how Wordsworth's lifelong ...
Page 23
... tion or appetite ( though that is critically implicated too ) : it is a highly freighted philosophical concept with serious consequences for the creation of selves in society . Miltonic taste involves a moral as well as an ...
... tion or appetite ( though that is critically implicated too ) : it is a highly freighted philosophical concept with serious consequences for the creation of selves in society . Miltonic taste involves a moral as well as an ...
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