Taste : a literary history / Denise Gigante.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gigante, Denise, 1965-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--History and criticism.

English literature.

Taste in literature.

Food habits in literature.

Gastronomy in literature.

Aesthetics, British.

Food in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (265 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, c2005.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

What 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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

1. Aesthetics and Appetite: An Introduction

2. Mortal Taste: Milton

3. The Century of Taste: Shaftesbury, Hume, Burke

4. Digesting Wordsworth

5. Lamb's Low-Urban Taste

6. Taste Outraged: Byron

7. Keats's Nausea

8. The Gastronome and the Snob: George IV

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 181-288) and index.

ISBN:

9786611731250

9781281731258

1281731250

9780300133059

0300133057

OCLC:

923587932