Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World: 10 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, Series Number 10)

Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World: 10 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, Series Number 10)

by TimothyMorton (Author)

Synopsis

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.

$125.26

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 316
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 12 Jan 1995

ISBN 10: 0521471354
ISBN 13: 9780521471350
Book Overview: A highly original study of Shelley's thought in relation to diet, consumption, the body, nature, and culture.

Media Reviews
'... a subtle, thought-provoking and ambitious analysis of the opposed ways of the lives of the rich and the poor, the hungry and the surfeited, as exposed in Shelley's thinking. Nobody interested either in Shelley's poetics or the body's politics will be able to ignore.' The Times Higher Education Supplement
'Timothy Morton ... is the first critic to take Shelley's vegetarianism seriously ... The results prove to be revolutionary in themselves ... his readings are ... attuned to the complexities of Shelleyan figurality ... this is a book of very real importance.' Shelley Journal
'The book is a kind of belated yet updated 'Renaissance self-fashioning' for Romantic studies. This is an exciting and genuinely original book which offers much to Shelley studies and to the wider current debate about the 'greening' of Romanticism.' Keats Shelley Review
'Morton takes us beyond Shelley (or the Shelleys) and toward the broader cultural and intellectual sphere of Romanticism generally, where we may usefully apply to other authors, other works, the lessons that Morton teaches so compellingly in his fine study.' The Journal of English and Germanic Philology
'Wide-ranging both in its historical research and its ingenious applications of theory, this book ... will be savoured by those who have an interest in the literary figuration of diet and consumption in all periods as well as the Romantic.' Notes and Queries
...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
Author Bio
Timothy Morton is Professor of English at Rice University, Houston.