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

by Timothy Morton

Overview

This groundbreaking study addresses the representation of food and drink in the works of Percy and Mary Shelley. With original studies of much-debated texts, it provides new perspectives in recent cultural history and theory concerning medicine and diet in the 1790SH1820 period. Morton shows how food in the social and literary text provided complex and ambivalent ways of signaling ideological preferences. It will appeal to all those interested in the body, ecology and social and anthropological approaches to Romantic literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521024754
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	03/16/2006
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Romanticism , #10
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	316
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Timothy Morton is Professor of English at Rice University, Houston.

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"...the book has some remarkable strengths that will make it a useful text for scholars interested in Percy Shelly, Romantic-period culture, the extension of New Ethical compassion as a disciplinary tool, and the potential applications of cultural materialism and green criticism." Nineteenth Century Prose

"...offers a superb synthesis of Romantic (and contemporary) literary, political, scientific, and cultural analysis, in which Shelley's vegetarianism, 'the redemptive discourse of natural diet' (p.85), is made brilliantly to play through and illuminate a host of poetic and political concerns." SEL 1500-1900

"His study is informed by an astonishing diversity of scholarship and theory, yet throughout the approach is consistent and consistently innovative, offering new perspectives on the ecology of the body." The Wordsworth Circle

"...will be savoured by those who have an interest in literary figuration of diet and consumption in all periods as well as the Romantic." Notes and Queries

From the Publisher