Shelley and the Revolution in Taste
Shelley and the Revolution in Taste
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This book brings together the themes of diet, consumption, the body, and human relationships with the natural world, in a highly original study of Shelley. A campaigning vegetarian and proto-ecological thinker, Shelley may seem to us curiously modern, but Morton offers an illuminatingly broad context for Shelley's views in eighteenth-century social and political thought concerning the relationships between humanity and nature. The book is at once grounded in the revolutionary history of the period 1790–1820, and informed by current theoretical issues and anthropological and sociological approaches to literature. Morton provides challenging new readings of much-debated poems, plays, and novels by both Percy and Mary Shelley, as well as the first sustained interpretation of Shelley's prose on diet. With its stimulating literary-historical reassessment of questions about nature and culture, this study will provoke fresh discussion about Shelley, Romanticism, and modernity.
- The first book on the body, diet, and ecology in Shelley studies
- Historically and textually detailed and theoretically sophisticated
- Explodes assumptions about 'Romanticism' and 'Enlightenment'
Reviews & endorsements
"...the book has some remarkable strengths that will make it a useful text for scholars interested in Percy Shelly, Romantic-period culture, the extension of New Ethical compassion as a disciplinary tool, and the potential applications of cultural materialism and green criticism." Nineteenth Century Prose
"...offers a superb synthesis of Romantic (and contemporary) literary, political, scientific, and cultural analysis, in which Shelley's vegetarianism, 'the redemptive discourse of natural diet' (p.85), is made brilliantly to play through and illuminate a host of poetic and political concerns." SEL 1500-1900
"His study is informed by an astonishing diversity of scholarship and theory, yet throughout the approach is consistent and consistently innovative, offering new perspectives on the ecology of the body." The Wordsworth Circle
"...will be savoured by those who have an interest in literary figuration of diet and consumption in all periods as well as the Romantic." Notes and Queries
Product details
- Published: January 1995
- Format: Hardback
- ISBN: 9780521471350
- Length: 316 pages
- Dimensions: 236 × 159 × 30 mm
- Weight: 0.63kg
- Contains: 4 b/w illus.
- Availability: Available
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: prescriptions
- 1. The rights of brutes
- 2. The purer nutriment: diet and Shelley's biographies
- 3. In the face: the poetics of the natural diet
- 4. Apollo in the jungle: healthy morals and the body beautiful
- 5. Intemperate figures: refining culture
- 6. Sustaining natures: Shelley and ecocriticism
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index.
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