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ABSTRACT
The essay discusses the scope of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s transformative rhetoric centred around the body and its potentially revolutionary transformation within the nature/culture landscape, especially through the discourse on vegetarian diet. The topic of the essay is explored through work by Timothy Morton on Shelley’s vegetarianism and also on ‘dark ecology’, trying to juxtapose the concept of diet on the one side, and the idea of ecological awareness on the other side with revolutionary/reformist intentions inscribed in Shelley’s transformative rhetoric of his vegetarian discourse. The main focus of the essay is Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet as part of lengthy notes for Queen Mab (printed in 1813), close read as the part of the whole textual body within which it appears. The topic of the essay is explored through the reception of Shelley’s poetry in the context of ecocriticism trying to address contemporary ecological issues and its reminiscences within Western civilization.
Notes
1 Timothy Morton, ‘Receptions,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, ed. Timothy Morton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 35–45.
2 Morton, ‘Receptions,’ 35.
3 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘Rhizome: Introduction,’ in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Bloomsbury, 1987), 3–25.
4 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4.
5 There is a complex relationship between the existence of Queen Mab and its notes, which haunts its reception and history. It is almost as if versions of texts are echoing its own future afterlives and significance. The first version of Queen Mab was printed in 1813 in an edition of 250 copies, but not published because of fears of prosecution. ‘A Vindication of Natural Diet’ was published separately as a pamphlet in 1813, with several passages omitted from the text written in notes to Queen Mab, which is also important to have in mind when going through the textual landscape. In 1821, William Clark published a pirated edition of the poem, which also points to its radical aura, especially considering the fact that it influenced early trade union and Chartist movements, and more generally, nineteenth- and twentieth-century radical working-class and British Marxist thinkers and activists. This rhizomatic haunting of cultural consciousness (to use the term by Deleuze and Guattari) intertwines with Shelley’s afterlife in numerous popular forms as Morton describes in great detail (see ‘Receptions’, in The Cambridge Companion to Shelley).
6 Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 83. Subsequent references to his edition will be given within parentheses in the main text.
7 Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 131.
8 Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 42.
9 Morton, Revolution in Taste, 131.
10 Morton, Dark Ecology, 42.
11 Ibid., 45.
12 Morton, Revolution in Taste, 56.
13 Morton, Dark Ecology, 95.
14 Morton, Revolution in Taste, 98.
15 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 11.
16 Morton, Revolution in Taste, 132.
17 Ibid.,135.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 136, 137.
20 Ibis., 138.
21 Ibid., 168–9.
22 Ibid., 239.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Zoran Varga
Zoran Varga is currently a doctoral student at the University of Zagreb, writing his PhD thesis on politics and aesthetics in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s late poetry. He has a master’s degree in English Language and Literature – British Literature and Culture and Comparative Literature from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb. He is also a member and secretary of the Croatian Association for English Studies, the national branch of the European Society for Studies of English. His professional interests include British Romanticism, Romantic and Modernist Poetry, Literary Criticism, and Politics and Literature.