Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni

“In pursuit of Percy Shelley, ‘The First Celebrity Vegan’: an essay on meat, sex, and broccoli” by Michael Owen Jones (2016)

Jones researches how Shelley inspired future generations of vegetarians through his own dietary views and choices. He seeks to explain why Shelley may have chosen to become a vegetarian in the first place, as well as what led him to shift away from this diet. Jones analyzes the author’s views “opposing cruelty to animals and his vision of a utopian society infused with equality, social justice, and spirituality that begins with an individual’s diet.” Part of this analysis includes placing Shelley’s diet within a “personal food system” framework.

“Laughter as Sympathy in Percy Shelley’s Poetics” by Matthew Ward (2015)

While Shelley does portray the stereotypical expressions of sadness and grief in his poems, Ward shows how he likewise “conceives of laughter as a vehicle for sympathy.” This utilization of laughter offers an alternative narrative for sympathy, where laughter is “a means of sharing emotions and ideas, and is related to his hopes for the circulation and influence of poetry.” Reading the “laughter” in Shelley’s poems lends a certain lightness to the poet and his work.

“Psychological Limits in Percy Shelley’s Prefaces” by Merrilees Roberts (2018)

Rather than focusing on Shelley’s poetry itself, Roberts looks at the prefaces he wrote for his poetry collections to try and get a sense of Shelley’s personality. Just as Ward focuses on Shelley’s portrayal of sympathy, Roberts has a similar focus. Roberts shows how Shelley’s prefaces “conflate Sympathy conceived of as a personal and morally accountable emotional reflex” and the same emotional capability “conceived as the abstract, disinterested aesthetic judgment.”