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 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 17901820 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.