Green Shelley Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN: 0-521-47354 (hbk). Price: £45/$59.95 (hbk).

The streets of the rainy northwestern American city where I live have recently witnessed a new kind of itinerant preacher. Now, in addition to the Krishna punks, Socialist Worker pamphleteers, and evangelical Christians, there are folks who proclaim the virtues of vegetarianism and the sinfulness of meat. It may be peculiar to me, but an air of crankiness lingers over these encounters that simply is not present in the other cases. Their seeming crankiness is strange still more because, while not a practicing vegetarian, I can agree with most of their arguments, whereas I am tempted to set the other groups straight on questions of doctrine. What makes dietary evangelism, as opposed to religious or political varieties, seem, well, cranky? Of all the radicalisms that Percy Bysshe Shelley embraced in his short life, vegetarianism was perhaps the first as well as most enduring. This is not necessarily the conclusion of Timothy Morton's Shelley and the Revolution in Taste, as he rigorously abstains from the language of center and margin, but a reader may well draw these conclusions himself. The fact that Shelley's vegetarian prose has gone through eight posthumous editions suggests it may also be his most enduring political legacy. The prominence of vegetarianism in Shelley's thought has always been an embarrassment for academic readers of Shelley, who have tended to write it off as a health issue or simply ignored it. And with good reason, since the project of reclaiming the ineffectual angel would have only been hampered by his association with vegetarianism. The aura of crankiness surrounding vegetarianism would only further weigh down that angel's wings. That association, however, cannot be denied, though recent marxist and feminist critics of romanticism have drawn little attention to it. Yet there it is, taking rather large portions of Shelley's corpus, and precisely because Morton focuses on "significant presences" rather than symptomatic absences, he is drawn to it as a subject. Criticism's interest in gaps and elisions has been salutary for romanticism, but in judging a movement that was always "ever more about to be," one wonders if an interest in absence is itself predetermined by a romantic ideology. Instead, The Revolution in Taste admirably synthesizes archival research and Deleuzian theory in a manner that is exciting and instructive. In short, the work is ground-breaking both in content and method, and its shortcomings, are can be directly attributed to its ambitions. The context in which Morton has placed Shelley is nothing short of revelatory. One of the benefits of the book is how it demonstrates that vegetarianism is a "revolutionary" discourse, having achieved a certain prominence in the ferment of the French Revolution. Of course, abstinence from meat is a perennial philosophical theme, but 1790-1820 saw an intensification of interest in the subject in Great Britain. Food scarcity because of the war gave it a special relevance and Morton suggests that interest in the subject crossed class lines: there were aristocratic as well as working-class vegetarian ideologues. Morton documents Shelley's association with, as well as borrowings from, a particular sect nicknamed "Brahmins" by the quarterlies. For the most part, they were petit-bourgeois intellectuals, much ridiculed in the press in the manner that limousine liberals once were in the United States. Peacock even parodied them (including Shelley) in 1820 as "lotophagi" in the first issue of The Medical Adviser. There is no question that eating meat was a political issue of the time, since many representations of the British public concentrated on its consumption of roast beef in contrast to the meager of diet of French Republicans. If the expense of meat …