ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the text and context of animals in Romantic-period writing by considering Percy Bysshe Shelley's idealistic non-violent 'vegetarianism' and Lord Byron's troubled carnivorousness in relation to contemporary discourses about meat-eating and diet. It discusses how the poets deploy these in their imaginative work. The chapter applies structural anthropological approaches to Romantic-period writing in the area, using Claude Levi-Strauss's and Mary Douglas's theories concerning strategies of categorization and taxonomy which separate human beings and animals and distinguish between different kinds of foods. Laon and Cythna renders eating aberrant not only by incongruous combinations with animals, childbirth and breast-feeding, but also by linking it with activities which deliberately challenge social structures and transgress established boundaries. The Island is Byron's most fully worked-out attempt to present a contemporary civilization totally different from anything he or his readers had known, and in it he constantly uses food to situate the otherness of Toobonai.
