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
"Novels of the Nation: Literary Theory, Post-Revolutionary Republicanism, and the Rise of the Novel in America, 1789-1812" examines previously understudied eighteenth-century texts on neoclassical rhetoric and the belles lettres and representations of literary sensibility in a selection of early American novels. In so doing, this study both highlights the integral connections republican-era literary discourse assumed between literariness, egalitarianism, and national stability and reveals how these relationships were reflected, reinforced, and renegotiated in America's first novels. Previous critical readings of the rise of the American novel resist discussions of the genre's literary qualities. Such readings either view the novel's sentimentalism as evidence of a failed aestheticism or claim that the early American novel's value is not aesthetic, but historical. This dissertation recovers the intellectual history that accorded historical, national, and political relevance to concepts like beauty, taste, and literary pleasure in the early national period and reveals the ways in which America's first novelists interrogated the central notion that a love of literature could be the cornerstone of a democratic society. Chapter 1 introduces two educational texts that taught literature in the neoclassical tradition and were widely read in America in the mid to late eighteenth century: Charles Rollin's Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres (1732) and Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783). Studying of these works establishes a more accurate picture of how the United States' first citizens thought about central concepts like literary taste, the social role of polite literature, and the relationship between aesthetic sensibility and national identity. Subsequent chapters proceed with a close analysis of the portrayal of literary sensibility in four novels authored in the years between the Revolution and the War of 1812, concentrating on scenes of reading, poetic composition, and conversation about polite literature. Chapter 2 centers on William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), Chapter 3 focuses on Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798), and Chapter 4 discusses Isaac Mitchell's Alonzo and Melissa (1811) and Chapter 4 addresses Rebecca Rush's Kelroy (1812). Reading these novels in concert with each other reveals changing reactions to the fundamental principles of literary discourse defined in Rollin and Blair's works. In the decades between 1789 and 1812, American authors moved from wholeheartedly accepting the tenets of neoclassical literary discourse and attempting to carve out a place for themselves as the modern descendants of the Greeks and Romans, to questioning the usefulness of this discourse's focus on beauty and taste in a world where more pragmatic concerns clearly reigned, to forging an uneasy peace between traditional literary theory's optimism and the more biting, unflinchingly critical modern paradigms of literature that hoped to replace it. The novel flourished in the context of the new United States precisely because it could manage the tensions that arose as a result of the conflict between neoclassical literary ideology and life on the ground in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century America. The novel could at once aim to communicate high ideals and inspire noble sentiments (key aims of classical literature) and regulate the aesthetic responses it hoped to evince (unversed and unadorned when compared to traditional epic genres like poetry, the novel avoided the appearance of being overwrought). Further, I suggest that acknowledging the literary transformations that took place in the earliest years of the United States' independence lends us a different lens through which to view the literary landscape of the nineteenth century. "Novels of the Nation" traces a historical line that connects eighteenth-century literary discourse's emphasis on beauty, taste, and national prosperity to both Emerson's interrogations of man's genius and to Stowe's mobilization of the sentimental novel in the fight against political and social injustice.
"Taste is a core concept for the social sciences and an orienting notion in everyday practice. It is of equal relevance to academics and laypeople alike. Theorizations of taste are frequently multi- disciplinary, bringing an opportunity to cross-fertilize ideas and concepts. At the same time, a reader, challenged by the diverse body and dispersed nature of theories on taste, needs guidance navigating the literature and framing areas of interest. Until now, those interested in an academic perspective on the concept have had to traverse a wide range of literature. This is the first book that assembles a range of writings on taste from across disciplines to provide the reader with a sense of the emerging and expanding boundaries of this field of study. Taste, Consumption and Markets offers a comprehensive and up-to-date review of taste, with an emphasis on how taste shapes boundaries, subcultures, and global culture, complemented by an introduction that provides a scaffold for the reader and a concluding section that reflects on the past, present, and future of research on taste. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to students at an advanced level, academics, and reflective practitioners. It addresses the topics with regard to the sociology of taste and consumption and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of consumer studies, consumption ethics, sociological perspectives on consumption, and cultural studies"--
"Taste is a core concept for the social sciences and an orienting notion in everyday practice. It is of equal relevance to academics and laypeople alike. Theorizations of taste are frequently multi- disciplinary, bringing an opportunity to cross-fertilize ideas and concepts. At the same time, a reader, challenged by the diverse body and dispersed nature of theories on taste, needs guidance navigating the literature and framing areas of interest. Until now, those interested in an academic perspective on the concept have had to traverse a wide range of literature. This is the first book that assembles a range of writings on taste from across disciplines to provide the reader with a sense of the emerging and expanding boundaries of this field of study. Taste, Consumption and Markets offers a comprehensive and up-to-date review of taste, with an emphasis on how taste shapes boundaries, subcultures, and global culture, complemented by an introduction that provides a scaffold for the reader and a concluding section that reflects on the past, present, and future of research on taste. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to students at an advanced level, academics, and reflective practitioners. It addresses the topics with regard to the sociology of taste and consumption and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of consumer studies, consumption ethics, sociological perspectives on consumption, and cultural studies"--
'The people's amusement': the growth in cinema-going and reading habits -- 'Fouling civilisation?: official attitudes towards popular film and literature -- Trade attitudes towards audience taste -- 'What made you put that rubbish on?': national trends in film popularity -- 'The appearance as an added incentive': national trends in literature popularity -- 'A very profitable enterprise': South Wales Miners' Institutes -- 'Gunmen, rustlers and a damsel in distress': working-class tastes in Derby -- 'The home of the brave"? working -class tastes in Portsmouth -- Popular film and literature: textual analyses -- Conclusion: 'giving the public what it wants'
AbstractThe interaction between smell and taste has been widely confirmed in the literature. Exposure to a congruent olfactory stimulus enhances taste, increases palatability and the desire to eat, and promotes food consumption. In this paper, we use laboratory experiments to show that, in addition to its role in taste enhancement, olfaction also plays a role in taste induction. Using the phenomena of cognitive sensory integration and mental imagery, we explain how exposure to a real odor congruent with the expected taste produces a taste sensation for which there is no real taste stimulus. For example, exposure to the smell of vanillin, which is a sugar‐congruent odor, creates a taste sensation of sweetness, increases palatability and food cravings, and increases consumption of sugar‐free biscuits. The lack of exposure to the actual taste stimulus of sugar does not prevent the taste‐congruent odor from creating a taste sensation of sweetness, an olfactory sweetness. Odors are able to induce a taste sensation for which there is no real taste stimulus. The results of this research have implications for the marketing of dietary foods. Tastefulness, which is reduced by the absence of flavor, can be increased by congruent olfactory stimuli in the environment and have a positive effect on the sales of this product category.
In "The Progress of Modern European Literature" (1910), Wilhelm Dilthey pointed out: "Firstly, we discover that poetry was determined by the common spirit of a smaller political-military community. It expresses the spirit of the society with the lyric poetry." (Dilthey, 2005: 1) He also outlined the representation of two spiritual activities—imagination and rationality within modern European literature, and proposed the perspective of spiritual history as a method for doing literary studies. In recent years, some experts of classical Chinese literature have been investigating the generation and evolvement of literary activities, out of discontent with the lack of attention on the relation between historical background and literary activities, and trying to explore this problem from different aspects such as the writer's mentality, faith, thought, and living condition, etc. With new perspectives, they intend to describe the relation between literary history and spiritual history more meticulously. But since they have not found a notion that is self-explanatory, the research about the relation his new monograph A History of Taste, carries out a thorough discussion on the evolution of the collective taste of the intelligentsia from Zhou dynasty (周代) to Han and Wei dynasties (漢魏) (1046 BC-266 AD), by using the notion "taste paradigm" as a mediator between literature and its producers. This book, which reveals the close linkage between Chinese literary history and spiritual history in the above-mentioned historical period, is significant in suggesting the method of spiritual history in studies of classical Chinese literature.
This article contributes to the literature on the association between class position and cultural tastes by analyzing a unique historical data set and asking whether there were significant class differences in the consumption of music in the 19th century. Archival data from a publisher in Milan are used to analyze the characteristics of customers who purchased sheet music between 1814 and 1823. To avoid contemporary depictions of cultural hierarchies (e.g. 'highbrow', 'lowbrow' and 'omnivorous' tastes), we offer a new method for considering both the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of music consumption. Considering both the aggregate level of music consumption and the evolution of individual patterns over time, we find little evidence that musical tastes were aligned with class position. This finding calls for more research on the origins of the strong link between social structure and cultural preferences in general, or between class position and musical tastes in particular, which we witness today.
In an effort to give a historical depth to recent discussions on taste in Aesthetic theory, this paper recovers a 19th century Hungarian paradigm. While taste first came to the forefront of philosophical reflection with the Enlightenment and especially with Kant, by now there is a growing literature on the survival of that discourse in the first half of the 19th century. The present author contributed to the research, which tried to show that in Hungary Count István Széchenyi, an influential political reformer, can be regarded as an author, who for socio-political reasons relied heavily on the British discourse of politeness and taste. This paper aims to show that the same discourse lived on and was employed in the second half of the 19th century in socio-political debates. The example is Baron Zsigmond Kemény, an admirer and follower of Széchenyi, who transformed the discourse into a bourgeois political-educational program.
In an effort to give a historical depth to recent discussions on taste in Aesthetic theory, this paper recovers a 19th century Hungarian paradigm. While taste first came to the forefront of philosophical reflection with the Enlightenment and especially with Kant, by now there is a growing literature on the survival of that discourse in the first half of the 19th century. The present author contributed to the research, which tried to show that in Hungary Count István Széchenyi, an influential political reformer, can be regarded as an author, who for socio-political reasons relied heavily on the British discourse of politeness and taste. This paper aims to show that the same discourse lived on and was employed in the second half of the 19th century in socio-political debates. The example is Baron Zsigmond Kemény, an admirer and follower of Széchenyi, who transformed the discourse into a bourgeois political-educational program.
This article speaks of literature, society, and kings in Java in the 18th and 19th centuries. The basic concept used to analyze is the literary sociology especially developed by Hypolite Taine. Taine's paradigm is built on the assumption that literature can be "packed" from the material base of a society, including race, time, and environment. For Taine, literature is not just a personalized game of imagination, but a recording of the ways of his day. Therefore, certain societies can be claimed as the source or origin (genetic) of creation and birth of literature. Thus, consciously or unconsciously, literature always adapts or adapts to the tastes of its readers.
Water in Hispano-arabic Food and Cooking during the Middle-Ages
For Hispano-arabic physicians of the Middle-Ages, water was not only a natural element but the essential condition of health and civilization. The ancient philosophical doctrine regarding the function of water was further amplified : from hydraulics developed a theory of taste to be found in the agronomical literature ('Awwārn), cooking-books (Kitāb al-tābikh), as well as in Beyṭār's considerable pharmacopoeia. As a liquid, water is also capable of effecting decompositions and new mixings ; cooking thus becomes an alchimie process involving dessication (couscous), fermentation (bread) and the determination of suitable tastes for health and pleasure.
This article explicitly connects a growing body of specific literature, the political ecology of conservation, to some of the often overlooked, main conceptual components emerging from political anthropology and geography (sources of legitimacy, governmentality, territoriality, or state making), political economy (commoditization, market integration, niche markets, or gentrification), and cultural studies of the environment (cultural transformations of nature, cultural heritage and landscapes, taste, and identity politics). All these concepts and literary fields are at the basis of the contemporary social analysis of conservation policies and their consequences. The article also provides an updated large bibliography on the concepts potentially relevant to a political ecology of conservation.Key Words: conservation, governmentality, taste, nature, commoditization of nature, territoriality
This article explicitly connects a growing body of specific literature, the political ecology of conservation, to some of the often overlooked, main conceptual components emerging from political anthropology and geography (sources of legitimacy, governmentality, territoriality, or state making), political economy (commoditization, market integration, niche markets, or gentrification), and cultural studies of the environment (cultural transformations of nature, cultural heritage and landscapes, taste, and identity politics). All these concepts and literary fields are at the basis of the contemporary social analysis of conservation policies and their consequences. The article also provides an updated large bibliography on the concepts potentially relevant to a political ecology of conservation.Key Words: conservation, governmentality, taste, nature, commoditization of nature, territoriality