D. Gigante, Taste. A Literary History

Denise GIGANTE, Taste. A Literary History

Yale University Press, 2006, 272 p.

ISBN: 9780300106527

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.

Denise Gigante is assistant professor of English at Stanford University.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments
List of 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