Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite brings two major critical impulses within the field of Romanticism to bear upon an important and growing field of research: appetite and its related discourses of taste and consumption. As consumption, in all its metaphorical variety, comes to displace the body as a theoritical site for challenging the distinction between inside and outside, food itself has attracted attention as a device to interrogate the rhetoric and politics of Romanticism. In brief, the volume initiates a dialogue between the cultural politics of food and eating, and the...

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was first published in 1818. From that point onwards, Frankenstein's monster has remained a key figure in the popular imagination. The novel is one of the most widely studied works of English literature, but we can also find traces of Frankenstein and his monstrous creation in a range of cultural forms from film to the erotic novel.

A highly original study of Shelley's thought in relation to diet, consumption, the body, nature, and culture.

Timothy Morton explores the significance of spice, and the spice trade, in Romantic literature, shedding new light on the impact of a growing consumer culture and capitalist ideology on writers of the period. The Poetics of Spice includes discussion of a wide range of related topics--exoticism, orientalism, colonialism, the slave trade, race and gender issues, and, above all, capitalism. The book surveys literary, political, medical, travel, trade and philosophical texts, and includes new readings of Milton, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Charlotte Smith and Southey among many others.

This groundbreaking study addresses the representation of food and drink in the works of Percy and Mary Shelley. With original studies of much-debated texts, it provides new perspectives in recent cultural history and theory concerning medicine and diet in the 1790SH1820 period. Morton shows how food in the social and literary text provided complex and ambivalent ways of signaling ideological preferences. It will appeal to all those interested in the body, ecology and social and anthropological approaches to Romantic literature.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 1822) was an extraordinary poet, playwright and essayist, revolutionary both in his ideas and in his artistic theory and practice. This 2006 collection of original essays by an international group of specialists is a comprehensive survey of the life, works and times of this radical Romantic writer. Three sections cover Shelley's life and posthumous reception; the basics of his poetry, prose and drama; and his immersion in the currents of philosophical and political thinking and practice. As well as providing a wide-ranging look at the state of existing scholarship,...

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 1822) was an extraordinary poet, playwright and essayist, revolutionary both in his ideas and in his artistic theory and practice. This 2006 collection of original essays by an international group of specialists is a comprehensive survey of the life, works and times of this radical Romantic writer. Three sections cover Shelley's life and posthumous reception; the basics of his poetry, prose and drama; and his immersion in the currents of philosophical and political thinking and practice. As well as providing a wide-ranging look at the state of existing scholarship,...

Timothy Morton explores the significance of spice, and the spice trade, in Romantic literature, shedding new light on the impact of a growing consumer culture and capitalist ideology on writers of the period. The Poetics of Spice includes discussion of a wide range of related topics--exoticism, orientalism, colonialism, the slave trade, race and gender issues, and, above all, capitalism. The book surveys literary, political, medical, travel, trade and philosophical texts, and includes new readings of Milton, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Charlotte Smith and Southey among many...

This study examines the radical tradition in British literary culture from the English Revolution to the French Revolution. It charts continuities between the two periods and examines the recuperation of ideas and texts from the earlier period in the 1790s and beyond. The volume argues that the radical agendas of the mid-seventeenth century, intended to change society fundamentally, did not disappear throughout the long eighteenth-century, only to be resuscitated at its close. Rather, through close textual analysis, these essays indicate a more continuous transmission.

Though contemporary European philosophy and critical theory have long had a robust engagement with Christianity, there has been no similar engagement with Buddhism-a surprising lack, given Buddhism's global reach and obvious affinities with much of Continental philosophy. This volume fills that gap, focusing on "nothing"-essential to Buddhism, of course, but also a key concept in critical theory from Hegel and Marx through deconstruction, queer theory, and contemporary speculative philosophy. Through an elaboration of emptiness in both critical and Buddhist traditions; an examination of the...