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 2
... turning the fruit into more than a common apple, or dietary container of nutriments. Eve does not give into temptation to taste the fruit because she is hungry, any more than Christ resists the luscious feasts of Paradise Regained ...
... turning the fruit into more than a common apple, or dietary container of nutriments. Eve does not give into temptation to taste the fruit because she is hungry, any more than Christ resists the luscious feasts of Paradise Regained ...
Page 3
... turn of the nineteenth century, the dialectical counterpart to taste was not only bodily appetite but also the wider sphere of material desires fed by consumer culture. Romantic writers deployed the gustatory metaphor of taste in the ...
... turn of the nineteenth century, the dialectical counterpart to taste was not only bodily appetite but also the wider sphere of material desires fed by consumer culture. Romantic writers deployed the gustatory metaphor of taste in the ...
Page 17
... turn drew encouragement from the rising popularity of the famous Greek treatise , attributed to Longinus , On the Sub- lime . ” 62 On the verge of the eighteenth - century effort to repress , sublimate , or otherwise discipline appetite ...
... turn drew encouragement from the rising popularity of the famous Greek treatise , attributed to Longinus , On the Sub- lime . ” 62 On the verge of the eighteenth - century effort to repress , sublimate , or otherwise discipline appetite ...
Page 18
... turn of the century had become respectable members of civil society and even leaders in public taste under the appellation of the gastronome . In these years gastronomy emerged as a distinct literary genre — witty , eclectic as table ...
... turn of the century had become respectable members of civil society and even leaders in public taste under the appellation of the gastronome . In these years gastronomy emerged as a distinct literary genre — witty , eclectic as table ...
Page 27
... turning the Lord's Supper into a cannibal feast " ( YP 6 : 554 ) . For Milton , " Consubstantia- tion and particularly transubstantiation . . . or cannibalism are utterly alien to reason , common sense and human behavior " ( YP 6 : 554 ) ...
... turning the Lord's Supper into a cannibal feast " ( YP 6 : 554 ) . For Milton , " Consubstantia- tion and particularly transubstantiation . . . or cannibalism are utterly alien to reason , common sense and human behavior " ( YP 6 : 554 ) ...
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