Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism

TIMOTHY MORTON is an Associate Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the Author of Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic, Radical Food: The Culture and Politics of Eating and Drinking, 1780-1830, and Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World.

"Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite is an important book that compellingly shows how high theory and cultural studies can be on the same menu. In doing so, Cultures of Taste persuasively demonstrates that any serious consideration of our social life must engage with Romanticism in all its historical, textual, and philosophical dimensions. This work is an impressive collection of writings that inaugurates the new field of diet studies in a wonderful manner." - Orrin N. C. Wang, University of Maryland, College Park "What kind of object is food, and what kind of engagement with the world is eating? The essays in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite take up such unlikely questions with a remarkable combination of historical specificity and theoretical inventiveness. Via juxtapositions - be it dining with Kant or reading fish n' chips - that continually reveal unexpected points of intersection among a wide range of critical perspectives, they demonstrate the extent to which Romantic culture organizes and is organized by an economics, a logic, and a metaphorics of consumption. Together with Timothy Morton's fine introduction and afterword, they argue collectively for an empiricist criticism that would be open to historical experience precisely to the extent that it is conceptually experimental." - Joshua Wilner, City College and The Graduate Center-CUNY

• Aftertaste The Unconsumable Un-Sublime and the Destruction of Literature in Keats and Shelley Speculative Consumption: Irony and Schlegel The Spirit Addict's Diet: Nietzsche, Kant and the Question of Nutrition Kant's Dinner Party: Feasting Philosophers, Opulent Persons, and Other Pesky Guests Romantic Dietetics! or, Eating Your Way to a New You! Romantic Cannibalism: Eating People in the South Seas Romanticism and the Fruits of Empire Immortal Dinners The Politics of the Platter: Charlotte Smith and the 'Science of Eating' Byron's World of Zest Hegel, Eating: Schelling and the Carnivorous Virility of the West (In)digestible Material: Negativity, Illness and Waste in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature The Endgame of Taste