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.

We resume the above discussion about sense perception and violence and delve further into the campaign Lucretius wages against presumed subjectivity. This chapter is a combination of two previously published articles (“Ocular Penetration, Grammatical Objectivity, and an Indecent Proposal in De Rerum Natura” and “Seminal Verse: Atomic Orality and Aurality in De Rerum Natura” ) both of which have undergone revision and expansion for the present volume. The weight of inquiry falls especially on sight and hearing, which are, perhaps not coincidentally, the primary modes of experiencing the poem or – to put it more in Lucretius’ parlance – the senses being assailed by the poem itself. Shown to be less than powerful in the womb in Chapter 2, here we find that Lucretius alters this uterine imagery to prove that men and their sense orifices are involuntary, womb-like repositories for nature’s inseminating forces.

Critics, commentators and historians have seized upon the ridiculous, comedic elements of Molière’s portrayals of salon culture and allowed the satire to upstage reality. Molière has been understood as belittling women’s attempts to influence expression in order to distance further salon culture from mainstream literary culture. However, considered in his seventeenth-century context, the playwright is not satirising women’s control of language or desire to critique literature in order to censure salon culture; rather Molière revels in exploring this complex cultural landscape that was as integral to the seventeenth century as the Sun King’s powerful rays. Molière’s contemporaries would not have interpreted the dramatist as censoring women’s agency. Posterity has tended to distance Molière from this worldly culture, recreating him as the all-knowing satirist who attempts to bring his contemporaries to their senses and excise worldly culture from the Grand Siècle. But Molière is not Alceste – he does not reject sociability, salon culture and galanterie. To conceive of salon culture and the values and practices associated with it – conversation, galanterie, sociabilité – as limited to a rarefied and marginalised space and practised only by an elite group is to misunderstand Molière’s context as well as the playwright’s intentions and his comedy.

Sherman argues that Marvell contributes to the secularization of the ars moriendi by exploring problems of taste in scenes of death. Sherman situates Marvell’s interest in taste by glancing at French and Italian forays into literary aesthetics and by Marvell’s own disquisitions on offensive style in his prose polemics. It is no surprise then to find Marvell experimenting with problems of good and bad taste in poems describing death like 'An Horatian Ode', 'The Unfortunate Lover', 'The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn', and in the tableaus featuring the demise of Captain Douglas. Sherman suggests that Marvell taps into Catholic iconography associated with the arts of dying to overstep the bounds of aesthetic and rhetorical decorum. He appropriates the sensuality of the Counter-Reformation’s aesthetic exalting the martyred body and the literature of tears (ars lachrimandi). With his focus on moments of sudden death, Marvell casts doubt on the value of preparing for a good death, instead preferring to observe how beauty is cut down in its prime. In this way, Marvell’s poetry of memorialization aestheticizes mortality and the work of mourning.

Chapter 7 focuses on the process that transformed West Central Africans from forced laborers into consumers of products manufactured elsewhere. The expansion of the colonial bureaucracy reveals the items West Central Africans collected during their lifetimes and the emotional and financial value associated with material culture. Their consumption patterns make it possible to explore the movement of goods, the role of commercial centers, and the changes in taste and fashion. Africans imported items that favored European industries at the expense of their local production, a clear demonstration of how colonial power, dispossession, and dependency have a long history and predate the twentieth century. Rulers and commoners desired material things beyond their basic needs and aspired to buy and collect a variety of goods. They consumed items that connected them to societies around the world and encouraged African political elites and warlords to engage in warfare and other strategies to enslave enemies, exacerbating violence, dispossession, and displacement. The expansion of the colonial bureaucracy reveals that African women not only acquired imported goods and transmitted them to loved ones but also made constant efforts to protect the assets they had accumulated during their lives.

The Attraction emotions are reactions of liking or disliking objects (or aspects of objects) resulting from an object’s appeal (or lack thereof). Appeal, in turn, depends on tastes, which in contrast to goals and standards, tend to be unanalyzable, Hence, the Attraction emotions are the least cognitively complex of all emotions. Tastes are treated broadly and include attitudes and preferences, and the notion of an object is also broad, including anything that is evaluated qua object, meaning that even events or agents’ actions can be viewed as objects. Although issues pertaining to aesthetic judgment are raised, they are not the focus of Attraction emotions. The Attraction emotion identified depends on whether an object is evaluated as being appealing or unappealing and whether it is viewed as itself being capable of emotion. Crossing these dimensions leads to four emotion types: “Affection” and “Enmity” emotions, which pertain to emotion-capable (generally animate) objects, and “Appreciation” and “Distaste” emotions, which pertain to emotion-incapable (generally inanimate) objects.

This essay describes how the modern cookbook and recipe structure we know today emerges from its adolescent form in the early republic and argues that American notions of “good taste” are foregrounded in a transatlantic economic system. As a textual object, the cookbook functions in a number of registers: it creates a distinct American identity that is based on a value system; it equates eating with virtue and nation-building that develop notions of taste and taste-making; and it is predicated on a transatlantic system of production. Focusing on the ingredient list and accompanying paratextual elements of a recipe can illuminate a broader story of how slave labor in the Caribbean contributes to an early American culinary and cultural identity.

This essay analyses how material formations of class are related to its symbolic trappings and why such an analysis may be currently relevant. Ecocriticism’s tendency to avoid work-based class analysis may be an effect of petroculture, whose flowing, accommodating logic reduces analysis to critique and reduces intervention to consumer choices. This essay argues that a confrontation between work, class, environmentalism, and narrative could be accomplished via the genre of the ‘boom narrative’. Boom narratives deal with signs of class stratification as well as the labour involved in resource extraction. Those based on actual events, such as the natural gas boom in North Dakota, travel widely, into journalistic and documentary coverage, and this coverage draws on and sometimes subverts boom narrative conventions. Television shows, including The Beverly Hillbillies and Dallas, helped instal petrocultural logic. An understanding of boom narratives’ appeal, and how their conventions get deployed, critiqued, and subverted intervenes in the flow of petrologic. Such intervention would require keeping work the focus of class, and keeping material effects of class the focus of narrative analysis. Intervention may also require more ecumenical approaches to genre, and rethinking scholarly modes of critique.

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson explores the social and private spaces of the New Negro movement to delineate the subjective but recognizable element of taste. The chapter reads spaces such as the salon, the parlor, and the cabaret in order to define the aesthetic considerations of the period. The interior design of such locales offers a new way of understanding the period outside of the Black/white binary and simplistic assumptions about the black bourgeoisie. Readers can discern a great deal about New Negro style by focusing on "the spatially attentive narratives of the storied interiors of the Harlem Renaissance." Reading Edward Christopher Williams’s The Letters of Davy Carr, Jean Toomer’s play Natalie Mann, as well as descriptions of important salon spaces such as Villa Lewaro, Sherrard-Johnson analyzes how the objects and accoutrements within certain spaces reflect the aesthetic debates of the New Negro period.

In this chapter, we discuss the existential concerns of the great Maestro Ludwig van Beethoven and how he was able to compose musical masterpieces while confronting severe hearing loss. We also describe age-related changes in vision, smell, taste, skin sensation, proprioception, and balance. Age-related cognitive changes such as attention, processing, learning, and memory are presented. Finally, a resolution is offered as to how Beethoven still composed with hearing loss.

This chapter describes the primary interventions for the sensory sensitivity presentation of ARFID, including:

• Choosing five new foods to learn about each week

• Setting aside a dedicated time to learn about these five foods using theFive Steps of learning (see, touch, smell, taste, chew)

• Identifying at least some of these new foods for repeated practice in the upcoming week

• Strategies for incorporating larger portions new foods into regular meals and snacks after small portions have been tasted several times