Chapter 4 focuses on the sensuous quintet integral to Guru Nanak’s metaphysical thought and praxis. Materially made up of transcendent fibers, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and seeing have the cognitive capacity to take audiences off to limitless territories, or inversely, get them tangled up in messy affairs. They belong to everybody irrespective of race, gender, sexuality, class, politics, or religion, and though they are different modalities, they are a part of the same unitary living body and work together intersensorially and synaesthetically. For Guru Nanak there is no stereotypical hierarchy between “lower” and “higher” senses; the five are equally saturated with ontological, ethical, psychological, and soteriological import and flourish in concert. However, in order to understand their critical role and function, the somatic agents are analyzed separately. Hopefully the positive, progressive Nanakian outlook can cure some of the chronic somatophobic abnormalities prevailing across cultures.

By closely examining the agonistics of mythos pursued by Milbank in Theology and Social Theory, I aim to problematise the idea of inter-mythic relations as fundamentally a matter of conflict. I go on to suggest that Milbank’s appeal to taste, considered in light of Jean-Louis Chrétien’s phenomenology of prayer, can be better thought as a participation in the perichoresis of the Trinity and of the creature’s return to its creator. By privileging the dynamics of desire and erotics over that of agonistics, I attempt to orient mythopoiesis toward the desire for God. Finally, I consider the way that mythoi can challenge or critique one another from within one another, allowing a new understanding, a new encounter with meaning, to emerge from the making of a new narrative and a new practice. In this I seek to point toward how it is possible to discern the movement of the Spirit in and through human cultural production (including mythopoiesis) working to bring all things, including our sinful and broken making, into God’s desire.

Clare’s declaration that he ‘found the poems in the fields, and only wrote them down’ is, to some extent, pretence; however quickly he might compose, he corrects and revises from very early on, before he gets any guidance from others. The more he writes, the more he confronts the inevitable problem of repetition: his solutions can be seen in the concentrated echoes and references back and forth between poems. The manuscripts in all their teeming detail demonstrate his determination to get things right. Once publication arrives he has to contend with the conflicting demands of editors, publishers, and supporters; there are vexed questions of taste and politics. As he moves towards The Shepherd’s Calendar, however keen his desire for independence, increasingly the process becomes collaborative. When his life is turned upside down with the move to Northborough in 1832, his deeply personal poems of loss are worked on with extraordinary intensity.

This chapter moves from the imaginative inhabitation of the world in general to the question of religious faith in particular. Religious faith concerns both the objects of perception and their frame: God is both an object of (partly imaginative) apprehension and a frame for our perception of the world at large. Drawing on both anthropological and psychological scholarship and on C. S. Lewis’s theory of transposition, the chapter examines the inalienable role of imagination in the perception of God and the necessary limits of such imaginative engagement. It concludes with a discussion of the significance of acknowledging experiences that do not make sense.

From the outset, food and the essay have shared a kinship, given that one of the original senses of the word ‘essai’ meant the ritual of tasting the French king’s food and drink. From metaphor to content, food has permeated the essay form; in turn, the essay became the vehicle for the emerging field of gastronomy. This chapter constellates several important moments of interaction between literal and literary taste, consumption and appetite, cultural criticism and culinary knowledge in essays by Michel Montaigne, Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, William Kitchiner, Launcelot Sturgeon, Charles Lamb, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Elizabeth Robins Pennell. As cosmopolitan practices of discretionary dining became more widespread, these gastronomic essayistic writers often satirised the burgeoning bourgeoisie and their cultural milieu. Given its flexibility, the essay remains paramount to food writing, in its many forms and genres.

Thomas Mann’s literary obsession with Nietzsche’ philosophy was lifelong, continuously evolving, and constantly subversive. His early short stories were preoccupied with Nietzsche’s Wagner reception and cultural critique of decadence; the middle-period novella, “Death in Venice” engaged with the mythical pair of the Dionysian and Apollonian; the novel Doktor Faustus, his self-proclaimed “Nietzsche book,” combined Nietzsche’s biography, aesthetics, and “the problem of the German.” In each phase, Mann’s reception was never simply dutiful, but rather mischievously pitted one Nietzschean position against another, deriving dramatic force from the often contradictory capaciousness of his thought. This chapter focuses on a work not always considered as part of Mann’s Nietzsche reception: Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, an early short story later expanded to become Mann’s last novel. The text playfully juxtaposes Nietzsche’s “problem of the actor” and his ideal of self-fashioning, what Alexander Nehamas describes as Nietzsche’s “life as literature.” It explores issues of style, taste, parody, “gay science,” and the concerns attendant upon the translation of Nietzsche’s literary philosophy back into literature proper. It shows how the parody and mockery of Nietzschean ideals cannot help but fall in with the models they turn on, and the implications for our understanding of Nietzsche’s own writing.

The Young Englishman’, Edward, aged nineteen, arrived in London destined for the law. Living as a student on a meagre allowance, he observed London society from its fringes and began to write a periodical and fiction for publication. He was greatly influenced by the debates over taste and its civilizing effects. The Seven Years War mobilized patriotism, anti-French feeling and reflections on the distinctive characteristics of Englishness. Faced with the untimely death of his father in 1757 and the news of his modest inheritance, the advice Edward received was to head for Jamaica where he might hope to secure a fortune.

During its short publishing life, the Iris Américaine proposed a complement to the enlightened White male American citizen promoted by Saint-Domingue’s other two periodicals, the Affiches Américaines and the Journal de Saint-Domingue. After summarizing the contributions of the Affiches and the Journal to the island’s cultural life and discussing the importance of “taste” in French cultural life, the chapter documents how the Iris honored the age-old dictum “to instruct and delight” by publishing a mix of diverting poetry, short stories, and nonfiction essays. Yet its content, however light, had the serious intent of tutoring White women in good taste—both for their own good and to civilize their men by transforming unruly passions into refined pleasures. While these objectives were framed in a metropolitan terms, they assumed special urgency in a society infamous for racial brutality and “disordered” sexuality. Thus, the Iris spoke to deep social anxieties and threatening realities: the failure to establish a stable, White population; the ubiquitous concubinage of enslaved Black women and free women of color; the consequent increase in the number of mixed-race people; and the fact that White colonists were vastly outnumbered by enslaved Black people.

This chapter argues that the relationship between sound and sense is to be historically understood, and that cultural soundscapes emerge from the accrued meaning that historical actors give to items that may have been there since a long time, but were not previously considered as relevant. The specific case to be discussed here is the practice of collecting (and publishing) ballads: as ballads acquired a new cultural meaning, collective popular interest incorporated them as an active element of the contemporary soundscape. Changes in the way of conceptualizing history and development, in perceiving the divide between oral and written culture, political events and a refashioning of the values attributed to ideas of naturalness and simplicity have all been crucial factors in the process of attribution of meaning to ballads. As cultural identity came to be defined by sounds and music, ballads acquired a new meaning and – of course – this process did not leave the genre unharmed: ‘elite minds’ selected and purged the material that was destined to represent marks of Britishness and proceeded towards the ‘civilizi+L10ng’ of ballads.

Chapter 1 discusses a constellation of texts that use satire to challenge the system of taste: Richard Bruce Nugent’s novel Gentleman Jigger; Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Bliss”; and Virginia Woolf’s essays “On Being Ill,” “Middlebrow,” and A Room of One’s Own. Though they precede Bourdieu’s Distinction by decades, these texts demonstrate their authors’ awareness of the ways aesthetic and gustatory taste are both acculturated and intertwined, and they use the slippage between these two forms of taste to denaturalize both. The systems of gustatory and aesthetic taste are challenged by the events narrated within each of these texts, and they challenge, too, the system of genres that defines satire as a mode that works against its objects. In these texts, satire is not just a way of maneuvering within or distancing oneself from a social system but a perversely reparative mode that reveals the pleasure that can inhere in resisting, failing, or working against one: the pleasure of liking “bad” foods, the pleasure of feeling too much, the pleasure of satire that embraces the sensation of being wrong.

This chapter focuses on the institutions of middlebrow culture in America, exploring their role in disseminating and also critiquing modernism. The smart magazines, reprint series, and book clubs of the interwar and midcentury period worked to create new audiences for modernist writing and to make difficult texts more accessible. Yet the discourse of the middlebrow – with its emphasis on affective response and its skepticism about experiment – formed a counterpractice to modernist and New Critical formalism. Middlebrow institutions were oriented toward self-improvement and the education of taste, and debates raged about whether their effect was to democratize culture or to standardize it. The chapter considers the tastemakers of the era, ranging from Vanity Fair and The Crisis to the members of the Algonquin Round Table. It also discusses the novelists – such as Anita Loos and Sinclair Lewis - who satirized the culture of upward mobility that emerged in the US following World War I.

This chapter examines the reception of romance in medieval Italy, focusing on the way in which Italian writers engaged with the form and content of the genre. It examines different modes of adaptation through the lens of three texts from different Italian-speaking communities and time periods. Firstly, the Franco-Venetian Prophecies de Merlin demonstrates the hybrid character of Italian romance, which combines French and Italian language and perspectives – in this case, to incorporate Italian interests in political prophecy into the Arthurian story. The Tuscan Tavola Ritonda characterizses Italian-vernacular adaptations of French prose cycles, combining ideals of chivalric heroism with civic values to resignify Tristan’s status as the perfect knight. Finally, the late medieval Ferrarese L’Inamoramento de Orlando by Matteo Maria Boiardo draws on the Italian cantari in its incorporation of romance themes and forms alongside chanson de geste. Italian medieval romance emerges as a malleable and porous genre that is always in dialogue with other genres and cultural perspectives.