Shelley and the Revolution in Taste discusses the significance of diet for Percy Bysshe Shelley and his circle, in the period of the French, American and Industrial Revolutions. Drawing on the aversive rhetoric of vegetarianism, Shelley refashioned taste, in revolt against what he conceived to be the hierarchical powers which controlled consumption, production and culture. The revolt in taste delineated new relationships between bodies and their environments.

In literary criticism, the study of historical context has become topical. I would like to direct inquiry towards issues in material culture (such as food). Eating, drinking and literature are all intensely lived aspects of cultural history, part of what Braudel called ‘the structures of everyday life’. Food and literature both involve ethical and aesthetic choices and patterns which are imagined and played out constantly. Questions of sympathy, humanitarianism, ecology, social change and even revolt mattered on a quotidian basis to the vegetarians. My aim has not been simply to record recipes, or cite instances of vegetarian argument; I have tried to detail the subcultural and counter-cultural structures of feeling in which vegetarianism was deployed. This was a period when nature, the body and consumption became highly charged political issues.

Some work has already been carried out to trace the development of discourses such as vegetarianism in the late eighteenth century. My subtitle is designed to draw attention to the most groundbreaking of these studies, Keith Thomas' Man and the Natural World. In adding to the existing work on the subject, I have tried to maintain a sense of four priorities about what kind of material I have been analysing, and how I interpret it.