Taste

May 1, 2005
Gigante (English, Stanford Univ.) here investigates the neglected relationship between aesthetic sensibilities and gustatory, or taste-related, physiology in literary history. Beginning with the "alimentary cosmology" of Milton's "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained", she identifies the various uses of the gustatory trope by 18th-century Enlightenment philosophers (e.g., Shaftesbury, Hume, and Burke) and 19th-century English Romantics (e.g., Wordsworth, Lamb, Byron, and Keats). She concludes with a discussion of the development of cuisine as a fine art reflecting the ascendancy of a middle-class consumer aesthetic. In laying out her argument, Gigante synthesizes an impressive array of literary, historical, philosophical, and scientific details that, while always provocative, sometimes strains credulity. At her best, however, Gigante is sensitive to the judgments that earlier critics have brought to her subject, and she clearly articulates ideas that have only been hinted at previously. In "Keats's Nausea," for example, Gigante shows -through careful textual exegesis of revisions of "The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream" -how Keats's knowledge of the physiology of taste, combined with his condition as an ailing consumptive, informed an aesthetic that prefigures existentialism. Recommended for academic libraries only, particularly those serving graduate programs in English literature. -Lee Ehlers, Greenville Cty. Lib. Syst., SC

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