Title: Shelley and the Revolution in taste : the body and the natural world /
Authors: Morton, Timothy, 1968-
Publisher: Cambridge University Press,
Year: 1994
Subjects: Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Political and social views.; Human body in literature.; Human-animal relationships Public opinion History; Nature conservation Public opinion History; Vegetarianism Public opinion History; Diet Public opinion History; Human-animal relationships in literature.; Vegetarianism in literature; Nature in literature.; Diet in literature.; Romanticism; Human Body in literature.; Diet, Vegetarian in literature.; Public Opinion
Abstract: "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."--Pub. desc.
Contents: Introduction: prescriptions -- The rights of brutes -- The purer nutriment: diet and Shelley's biographies -- In the face: the poetics of the natural diet -- Apollo in the jungle: healthy morals and the body beautiful -- Intemperate figures: refining culture -- Sustaining natures: Shelley and eco-criticism -- Bibliography.