ABSTRACT

This chapter deals with an upper-class refinement of taste, a form of ‘sophistication’ that delights in risking the consumption of disgusting things. Ironically, pace Bakhtin, radical working-class lyrics in the Romantic period can have more in common with Shelley’s high rather than his low style. Swellfoot Post-modern culture, with its questioning of what counts as appropriate distance from the object of enjoyment, may be more kind to Shelley’s play than previous aesthetic norms. In Shelley’s hands, prosopopoeia becomes nothing less than a critique of normative ways of discriminating between appropriate objects of sympathy and enjoyment, and between those very categories of sympathy and enjoyment. Shelley’s porcine poetics leaps beyond the caricatures of Orwell and Pink Floyd. Shelley demonstrates a more fundamental and in a sense philosophical engagement with the pigs themselves as suffering sentient beings. The intense food imagery in Swellfoot evokes the density and affective power of language.