Taste
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A Literary History
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Format: PaperPrice: $29.00
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.
"Highly original, immensely learned, and utterly sound. Milton, Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, Byron, and Keats are marvelously illuminated by her fresh perspectives."—Harold Bloom
"This is a true history of tastes. It demonstrates, as no other work I know, the literal and metaphoric levels of taste and, by extension, of literary judgment and cultural fashions. The new interpretations of individual authors such as Milton, Wordsworth, Byron, Lamb, and Keats offer a fresh angle of vision on each writer examined."—James Engell, Harvard University
"Highly recommended."—Choice
"It’s a nifty entrée to both aesthetics and Romanticism, but with the substance of a main course."—Steven Carroll, The Age
"A valuable treatment of the topic."—Bharat Tandon, Times Literary Supplement
"Mount[s] new and provocative arguments. . . . A formidable and learned study. . . . Taste is insightful and stimulating, and it is bound to be cited as a vital consideration of eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy and practice. . . . [It] can be read with gusto by anyone with a taste for the history and theory of food and eating in romantic literature and culture."—Christine Roth, Nineteenth Century Studies
Publication Date: March 28, 2005
