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Shelley and The Revolution in Taste by Timothy Morton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii, 298. $57.95.
It was Carl Woodring, in a graduate class on Queen Mab, who first taught me the significance of Shelley's vegetarianism. (He had treated the topic briefly in his 1970 Politics in English Romantic Poetry.) Woodring's historicist approach authorized his taking an interest in even the marginal, "cranky" ideas of Shelley, as long as they were placed in broader socio-political contexts. This approach helped pave the way for new historicism in Romantic studies, which has in turn led to the even more deliberately interdisciplinary and self-consciously theorized cultural studies practiced in Timothy Morton's fine book on Shelley's vegetarianism.
This book is important as much for its method as for its content. Though Morton admits to being inspired by Clifford Geertz, it makes sense to think of his practice not as new historicism but (to use his own preferred terms) as "'green' cultural criticism"-which is to say that, rather than merely providing contexts for ecological themes in Shelley's texts, this book really does use Shelley to explore "how the body and its social and natural environments may be interrelated" (2). In listing his methodological influences, Morton names not only the expected Shelleyans and Romanticists (Dawson, Hogle, Leask), but key social scientists (Appadurai, Bourdieu), social historians (Drummond and Wilbraham, Salaman), and cultural theorists (Thomas, Adams, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari). These help provide ways to articulate historical discourses of vegetarianism and ecology. Along the way, various "primary" materials, including graphical satires, prints, and pamphlets, come into focus in useful ways, as Morton weaves theoretical insights among thick descriptions of particular texts and cultural practices. In the end, the book makes good on its claim: it "rescues the theme of natural diet from its marginality in critical discourse and explains how it may be understood in ways which make it hard to dismiss as `cranky"' (11).
The first half of the book outlines historical, political, and discursive contexts for Shelley's notion that "the depravity of the physical and moral nature of man originated in his unnatural habits of...