Shelley and the Revolution in Taste

This book brings together the themes of diet, consumption, the body, and human relationships with the natural world, in a highly original study of the poet Shelley, a campaigning vegetarian and proto-ecological thinker. Morton offers an illuminatingly broad context for his views in eighteenth-century social and political thought concerning the place of humans in nature, culture, and society.

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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.