Reading Veganism

<em>Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan 1818 to Present</em> focuses on the iteration of the trope 'the monstrous vegan' across two hundred years of Anglophone literature. Explicating through such monsters veganism's relation to utopian longing and challenge to the conceptual category of the<br>'human ' the book explores ways in which ethical identities can be written represented and transmitted. <p/><em>Reading Veganism</em> proposes that we can recognise and identify the monstrous vegan in relation to four key traits. First monstrous vegans do not eat animals an abstinence that generates a seemingly inexplicable anxiety in those who encounter them. Second they are hybrid assemblages of human and<br>nonhuman animal parts destabilising existing taxonomical classifications. Third monstrous vegans are sired outside of heterosexual reproduction the product of male acts of creation. And finally monstrous vegans are intimately connected to acts of writing and literary creation. The principle<br>contention of the book is that understandings of veganism as identity and practice are limited without a consideration of multiplicity provisionality failure and insufficiency within vegan definition and lived practice. Veganism's association with positivity in its drive for health and purity <br>is countered by a necessary and productive negativity generated by a recognition of the horrors of the modern world. Vegan monsters rehearse the key paradoxes involved in the writing of vegan identity.<br>