Taste : A Literary History
by Denise Gigante
Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press (March 11, 2005)
ISBN: 0300106521
Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.7 x 0.8 inches
Editorial Reviews
Reviews
"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 original, immensely learned, and utterly sound. Milton,
Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, Byron, and Keats are marvelously illuminated
by Gigante's fresh perspectives." --Harold Bloom, Yale University
Book Description
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, gastronomers 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
Keatsian 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.
Denise Gigante
Assistant Professor of English
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305
(650)725-7080
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