The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing

by Noggle, James

• ISBN13: 9780199642434
• ISBN10: 0199642435
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-04-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Is taste a quick, momentary experience in the individual mind? Or something durable, shaped by slow, historical processes, affecting groups of people at different times and places? British writers in the eighteenth century believed that it was both, and the tension between these temporal poles shaped the meaning of taste in the period and set a course for aesthetics in following centuries. Focusing on writing in many genres-Alexander Pope's poems, David Hume's philosophy, travel writing, essays by Hannah More and Anna Barbauld, and novels by Frances Burney and William Beckford-this book sees the divided temporality of taste as an unpredictable force in British writing. The eighteenth century was the age of taste. Writers saw its intense effects on individual minds as especially characteristic of the collective present of British modernity whilst they also recognized the disturbing tendency of taste's immediacy and its historical roles to interrupt and foreclose on each other. While noting how taste's two temporal flavours may be made to agree in order to consolidate various national, social, and gendered identities, this book also demonstrates that taste's dual temporality makes it more disruptive than scholars usually think. As such, taste models a kind of critical practice that this book itself endeavours to inherit: the insistent testing of the moment of discernment and inherited ways of thinking and feeling against each other.

Author Biography

James Noggle is professor of English at Wellesley College.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Progress of Pleasure	p. 1
Times Upon the Mind	p. 5
The Two Presents	p. 21
The Composite Fantasy	p. 27
Taste against Taste in Pope's Epistle to Burlington	p. 40
The Britishness of the Present at Stowe	p. 64
An Half-Formed Smile	p. 67
Taste Supreme, Taste Corrupt	p. 79
Immediate Termination	p. 85
'Almost Inseparable': Taste and History in Hume	p. 96
Appearance as Experience: Three Women's Texts about Taste of the 1770s	p. 124
Before It Has Time to Shield Itself	p. 128
Most Becoming Greater Attention	p. 134
To Appear Inattentive	p. 142
The Power of Pure Contingency: Fashion in Smith and the Reynoldses	p. 151
A Haunch Button	p. 156
Voluntarily Added Approbation v	p. 166
The Last Stage of Depravity	p. 172
The Hell of Ownership: Beckford on Collecting	p. 178
Epilogue: Taste and the New Formalism	p. 204
Works Cited	p. 212
Before 1825	p. 212
After 1825	p. 218
Index	p. 229
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