Shelley and the Revolution in Taste
The Body and the Natural World

A highly original study of Shelley's thought in relation to diet, consumption, the body, nature, and culture.

Timothy Morton (Author)

9780521471350, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 12 January 1995

316 pages, 4 b/w illus.
23.6 x 15.9 x 3 cm, 0.63 kg

'Wide-ranging both in its historical research and its ingenious applications of theory, this book … will be savoured by those who have an interest in the literary figuration of diet and consumption in all periods as well as the Romantic.' Notes and Queries

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC]