Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century
BY THEOPHILUS SAVVAS
Cambridge UP, 2024
ISBN: 9781009287265
Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century re-assesses both canonical and less well-known literary texts to illuminate how vegetarianism and veganism can be understood as literary phenomena, as well as dietary and cultural practices. It offers a broad historical span ranging from ancient thinkers and writers, such as Pythagoras and Ovid, to contemporary novelists, including Ruth L. Ozeki and Jonathan Franzen. The expansive historical scope is complemented by a cross-cultural focus which emphasizes that the philosophy behind these diets has developed through a dialogic relationship between east and west. The book demonstrates, also, the way in which carnivorism has functioned as an ideology, one which has underpinned actions harmful to both human and non-human animals.
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Content includes:
Chapter 1 - ‘everybody eating everyone else’
Chapter 2 - Pythagoreans; or, Vegetarians before ‘Vegetarianism’
Chapter 3 - Vegetarianism and the Utopian Novel
Chapter 4 - Vegetarianism as Religion
Chapter 5 - Vegetarianism in the Fiction of Women’s Liberation
Chapter 6 - Animal Abstinence in the Anthropocene
Chapter 7 - ‘Pity the meat!’: Ideology, Metaphor, Violence
"What we have here is a monograph in food studies that transforms the field as a whole. The scope of this project is expansive, the analysis is consistently delightful, and the argument is original, making an important contribution to literary histories of vegetarianism." —Gitanjali Shahani, San Francisco State University
Theophilus Savvas is a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. He works on postmodernist American writing and the interconnections between history and fiction as well as literature and ecology.
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