1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910807362703321

Autore

Gigante Denise <1965->

Titolo

Taste : a literary history / / Denise Gigante

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Haven, : Yale University Press, c2005

ISBN

1-281-73125-0

9786611731250

0-300-13305-7

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (265 p.)

Disciplina

820.9/3559

Soggetti

English literature - History and criticism

Taste in literature

Food habits in literature

Gastronomy in literature

Aesthetics, British

Food in literature

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

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

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

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.