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This paper looks at the high/low brow paradigm in a period rich in cultural life and literary creation, 1845-1855. In America, more than anywhere else at that time, taste was intimately connected with democracy. In discussing this relationship at the level of literary works, I focus on successful American writers' often conflicting views on democratic aspirations in connection with their literary achievement. The paper further traces the politics of taste at the level of the American public and addresses several questions among which: Was the mid-19th century audience less segmented than it has been since the Gilded Age? And if so, to what extent did participatory culture account for it? What role did nationalism play in shaping American literary taste between 1845 and 1855?

Food is an essential part of our lives and is no longer simply a physiological function. This presentation aims to introduce an initial exploration of the literature with relations to the potential relationship between celebrity chefs and the construction of taste. Taste is intrinsically linked to food, both from a gustatory aspect as well as from an aesthetic perspective. Within this arena, the celebrity chef has become an important part of contemporary British society as an actor in transmitting concepts of taste and distinction through television and media. However, as such, the specific association between celebrity chefs and taste remains under-examined. A systematic and extensive review of the literature has been carried out using key words in databases, as well as an examination of important texts. The significant themes arising from the review may suggest that certain conceptual frameworks are emerging such as the significance of the structuralist approach which suggests that taste is socially and culturally constructed. This contrasts with the materialist approach which argues that taste is connected to external influences such as economic and political changes whilst a post-structuralist approach posits that individual identity is central to the construction of taste. Finally, a very useful categorisation and clustering of the chefs has arisen. This has informed the methodological approach which will be a qualitative discourse analysis of the television shows and cookbooks in order to extract the possible link between the chefs and the construction of taste. Findings so far may suggest that the celebrity chef has developed into a modern cultural figure that embodies important notions of contemporary shifts in attitudes towards gender, cooking, ethics, consumption, culinary taste and cultural capital and that they are becoming key players as a wider sociological phenomenon.

Michael Stugrin's essay is both theoretical and practical: he suggests that texts, when viewed as "structures ofperception," give us the "voices of the reality which they were part of and helped shape." He then proceeds to apply this theory to a number of spiritual texts popular during the Middle Ages to give us an idea of popular taste at that time. Such texts were structured in a highly affective way to affirm testimonies o f faith and to commemorate God's promises to men. But perhaps most importantly, these spiritual texts, along with such texts as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and countless prose treatises and sermons, provided medieval audiences with a way of "knowing" within the context of human experience in a time of great cultural stress.

In a study ranging from Futurist cookbooks to fast-food lyrics, this dissertation opens up new perspectives on modernist writing in relation to key developments in American food culture. It resituates popular culinary texts within a discourse of literary aesthetics and rereads literary texts as they reflect the conditions of alimentary production and consumption. Pairing chefs and poets -- Julia Child & Gertrude Stein, Poppy Cannon & Frank O'Hara, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor & Harryette Mullen -- I show how a modernist fixation on the materiality of edible things, expressed through the language of food, became a way for American writers to respond to the culinary, political, and aesthetic tastes of a nation undergoing tremendous shifts: from an austere wartime sensibility of patriotic eating, to the postwar excess of culinary cosmopolitanism, and finally, to racially inflected supermarket pastorals in the second half of the century. My research engages an interdisciplinary cross-section of literary and visual forms, drawing on culinary history, art theory, cultural anthropology, race and gender studies, eco-criticism, and food studies, while remaining invested in literary analysis, to illuminate the correlating aesthetic economies of foodstuff and language, and to rethink the collision of popular culture and high art. I consider how modernism positions food as an innovative site for the ingestion and reflux of ideas, reconceptualizations of art, reflections on embodied humanity, and broader queries of taste. I argue that just as cooking makes an aesthetics of everyday food by lifting it from routine to art, literature reflexively uses food to address its own necessariness; sustenance for the physical and imaginary palates of Americans during moments of significant change.

Food is an essential part of our lives and is clearly more than simply a physiological requirement As such, the study of food is a useful means to help us understand important social and cultural factors that influence the way we live our lives. Taste is intrinsically linked to food, both from a gustatory aspect as well as from an aesthetic perspective. Aesthetically, taste can serve as a social discriminator because it implies notions of choice. Within this arena, the celebrity chef has become an important part of contemporary British society as an arbitrator in transmitting concepts of taste and distinction through television and other media. The celebrity chef is now a modern cultural figure that embodies notions of contemporary shifts in attitudes towards cooking, ethics, consumption, culinary taste, gender and cultural capital. This work in progress will seek to determine currently under-examined links between the construction of taste and celebrity chefs. An extensive literature review has considered the sociological aspects of the construction of taste. The structuralist approach suggests that taste is socially and culturally constructed. A materialist approach argues that taste is connected to external influences such as economic and political changes, whilst post-modernist thinking posits that individual identity is central to the construction of taste. The proposed methodology is qualitative content analysis through the scrutiny of chosen television shows and associated cookbooks. It is anticipated that the data will be coded and examined through discourse analysis. The conclusions may suggest that the chefs have some influence in conveying messages of public health, lifestyle and food choices through their television shows, cookbooks and internet presence and therefore may be players within a wider sociological phenomenon.

Elizabeth Swann investigates the relationship between the physical sense of taste and taste as a figurative term associated with knowledge and judgment in early modern literature and culture. She argues that - unlike aesthetic taste in the eighteenth century - discriminative taste was entwined with embodied experience in this period. Although taste was tarnished by its associations with Adam and Eve's fall from Eden, it also functioned positively, as a source of useful, and potentially redemptive, literary, spiritual, experimental, and intersubjective knowledge. Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England juxtaposes canonical literary works by authors such as Shakespeare with a broad range of medical, polemical, theological, philosophical, didactic, and dietetic sources. In doing so, the book reveals the central importance of taste to the experience and articulation of key developments in the literate, religious, and social cultures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The experience of discrimination based on caste, especially the stigma of untouchability, never formed a part of the socio-cultural and intellectual history of modern India. This article focuses on the life of Gurram Jashua (1895–1971) and re-reads the poignant and lived experience of untouchability on the basis of his seminal autobiography and other literary texts written in Telugu. This article argues that in ideas against caste prejudices, it is the themes of self-suffering and lived experience that provide a crucial impetus to the germination of protest. Through an analysis of Jashua's writings, especially Gabbilam, often called the Dalit Bible, this article attempts to capture and record the psychosomatic agony of living under the gaze of caste. With an untouchable whose rebellious spirit questioned the legitimacy of Hindu Brahmanical ideology cast as its hero, Gabbilam's revolutionary intervention subverted the content and form of the classical Telugu literary sphere. It was a socially and politically relevant text because in it, Jashua also engaged with anti-colonial nationalism and other issues of his time. Jashua remains peerless in his ability to express the dark realities of caste harnessed into a literary rhythm, as he continues to be read and admired even by non-Dalits.

Studies of transnational media flow and reception discuss audiences as cultural-linguistic groups that make idiosyncratic content choices, but say little to distinguish or explain their collective tastes. The literature on (inter)cultural consumption suggests that cultural preferences are more similar among societies that share a cultural or linguistic affinity than those that do not. Examining national acceptance of, and taste in, Hollywood films within a global sample of countries, this study quantifies the dissimilarities in genre preferences between the United States and importing countries based on 2002-2007 box-office sales. The analysis shows that genre taste dissimilarities are related positively to cultural distance between countries, and negatively to the English proficiency of the importing country. Furthermore, the economic attributes of the importer have no effect on taste dissimilarity. The analysis also shows that the genre tastes of individual countries have converged toward those of American audiences during these years.

The Government of the Senses is a study of how the changes in aesthetic culture that occurred in the wake of empiricism operated as regulating social processes. Tracking the rise of a new concern with tastefulness as well as various approaches to aesthetic detachment, I describe how these critical discourses translated into different styles of subjectification. Each chapter identifies figural representations in literature and visual culture that reflect what it felt like to participate in the new aesthetic culture. Chapter One describes the new interest in ideas of taste and "gust" in John Milton's work and models of aesthetic detachment in John Dryden, showing how Lord Shaftesbury and Joseph Addison developed these models of aesthetic behavior into a comprehensive social program. Chapter Two argues for a continuity between the cultivation of pleasure in the Restoration libertine discourse of Lord Rochester and George Etherege and the eighteenth-century cultivation of aesthetic pleasures. I show the importance of the fop character type in the transition to socially acceptable enjoyments: at the center of ambivalence about cultural consumption, the fop is the first figure that condenses the experience of modern aesthetic subjectivity. Chapter Three follows the inner sense tradition, arguing that Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe narrates an aesthetic self-fashioning by testing the limits of detachment from social life. This wildly popular novel shows how culturally relevant the new aesthetic culture had become beyond the stratified elites. Chapter Four studies the emergence of a socially intelligible figure of the person of taste between Jonathan Richardson's theory of connoisseurship and the major statements on the standard of taste in the 1750s. It shows that the methods, tensions, and models of authority associated with the new aesthetics were most fully exemplified in the literary career of Alexander Pope. Methodologically, this project studies the regulating effects of aesthetics using Michel Foucault's late theory of "governmentality" and it describe aesthetics as a self-sustaining social process using the theory of Niklas Luhmann. The chapters also include discussions of the Cartesian theory of pleasure, Hobbesian psychology, the theory of the je ne sais quoi of Dominique Bouhours, the models of conduct in Baltasar Gracián and the Chevalier de Méré, John Locke on secondary qualities and self-education, inner sense theory in Ralph Cudworth and Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith on self-regulation, William Hogarth on utility, and the theories of taste in Edmund Burke, Alexander Gerard, and David Hume. I show that the first phase of modern British aesthetics fashioned a coherent model for the conduct of conduct using the intensities of the sensitive body.

The dissertation is based on data about almos 500 contemporary works of Lithuanian fiction: which of them are discussed in academic pulications; which are analysed in the students' finishing theses; which received state funding for publishing; which were awarded literary prizes; which are most often borrowed from libraries. Theoretical model defines all these factors as "acts of transmission", on which the "survival" of the work depends – whether or not it is going to be consumed and remembered in the future. The quantitative data is analysed alongside "performance protocols" - written statements about books, from online discussions and blogs to academic publications. The results indicate that the usual opposition of "popular" vs. "professionally acclaimed" is almost non-existant – the professional and non-professional readers in most cases choose the same books. However, the non-professional readers appreciate recognising what they find familiar from their experience of reality, whereas the professionals focus on comparing works of literature to each other. Finally, a third trend is recognised – it is called institutionalised taste. 48% of books funded by the state do not interest neither professional nor non-professional readers

The dissertation is based on data about almost 500 contemporary works of Lithuanian fiction: which of them are discussed in academic pulications; which are analysed in the students' finishing theses; which received state funding for publishing; which were awarded literary prizes; which are most often borrowed from libraries. Theoretical model defines all these factors as "acts of transmission", on which the "survival" of the work depends – whether or not it is going to be consumed and remembered in the future. The quantitative data is analysed alongside "performance protocols" - written statements about books, from online discussions and blogs to academic publications. The results indicate that the usual opposition of "popular" vs. "professionally acclaimed" is almost non-existant – the professional and non-professional readers in most cases choose the same books. However, the non-professional readers appreciate recognising what they find familiar from their experience of reality, whereas the professionals focus on comparing works of literature to each other. Finally, a third trend is recognised – it is called institutionalised taste. 48% of books funded by the state do not interest neither professional nor non-professional readers.

The dissertation is based on data about almost 500 contemporary works of Lithuanian fiction: which of them are discussed in academic pulications; which are analysed in the students' finishing theses; which received state funding for publishing; which were awarded literary prizes; which are most often borrowed from libraries. Theoretical model defines all these factors as "acts of transmission", on which the "survival" of the work depends – whether or not it is going to be consumed and remembered in the future. The quantitative data is analysed alongside "performance protocols" - written statements about books, from online discussions and blogs to academic publications. The results indicate that the usual opposition of "popular" vs. "professionally acclaimed" is almost non-existant – the professional and non-professional readers in most cases choose the same books. However, the non-professional readers appreciate recognising what they find familiar from their experience of reality, whereas the professionals focus on comparing works of literature to each other. Finally, a third trend is recognised – it is called institutionalised taste. 48% of books funded by the state do not interest neither professional nor non-professional readers.