This chapter provides an overview of vegetarian and vegan practice from Ancient times to the beginning of the twentieth century. The first section focuses on the representation of Pythagoras in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and on the Aristotelian and Biblical depictions of the relationship between humans and non-human animals; the second explores Early Modern attitudes, including a discussion of the vegetarianism in More’s Utopia; the third offers readings of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World; the fourth details the emergence of the word ’vegetarian’ in the context of Romanticism and Transcendentalism.

This chapter focuses on the fiction of women’s liberation and its representations of vegetarianism. The first part offers readings of the fiction of Brigid Brophy, a pioneer of the animal rights movement, and Isabel Colegate in the context of the British class system; the second uses several novels by North American writers (Margaret Atwood, Marge Piercy, Alison Lurie) to offer a rethinking of Carol J. Adams’s theory of feminist-vegetarianism before suggesting the ways in which Octavia Butler’s novel Dawn helps us to link vegetarian/vegan theory with decolonial theory and practice.

Chapter 3 details the connection between the utopian novel and vegetarianism. It argues that vegetarianism plays an important role in the two most significant texts in the development of the genre in the late-nineteenth century: Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. It suggests that while H. G. Wells’s conflicted personal views on vegetarianism means that the subject is treated with a marked ambivalence, ultimately benefiting the fiction, the wholehearted endorsement of vegetarianism in Bellamy’s Equality is one element amongst several that reduces the text to little more than didactic screed. Here the important connection between women’s writing and vegetarianism and veganism is brought to the fore in a discussion of the British writer Mrs George Corbett and the American Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Chapter 4 highlights the way in which vegetarianism may be understood as an alternative (to) religion. The first part of the chapter suggests that after 1962 vegetarianism is central to the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and that no proper understanding of that fiction can be obtained without first understanding Singer’s vegetarian epistemology. This stands in contrast to the traditional view which is that Singer’s vegetarianism was only a kind of sublimation of Jewish dietary laws. The second part of the chapter focuses on Graham Greene’s The Comedians, arguing that the vegetarianism of Mr and Mrs Smith, which appears at first to be only comic relief, comes to take on much greater significance since it emerges as a powerful kind of surrogate faith – the kind of faith that Brown, the narrator, has lost.

This chapter explores fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century in the twin contexts of American writing after postmodernism and climate change. It argues that Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meat and Jonathan Franzen’s Purity both ultimately undermine the connection between individual agency and effective political action – the former because of its vacillating metamodernist sensibility, and the latter as a consequence of the author’s retreat to realism and undermining of character – but that Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker, by gesturing towards a posthumanist perspective, intimates a way through the impasse.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of how this project fits into the broader categories of critical eating studies and critical animal studies. Through a reading of Byron’s The Corsair, it offers an example of some of the book’s central arguments: that the development of vegetarianism and veganism must be understood as the result of an east–west dialogic relationship rather than as a one-way process of cultural transmission; that religion will often be used to explain away an individual’s dietary choice; that the connections with gender of vegetarianism and veganism are more complicated than has often been suggested.

The final chapter draws together the themes of the book. It uses the work of Derrida, Levi, Camus, and Judith Butler to delineate the way in which carnivorism operates as an ideology of violence; it argues that much harm against the human results from the way in which we misunderstand and misconceptualise the animal. It also suggests the limitations of metaphorical thinking with regards the human–animal relationship, and suggests that a metonymical conception, based on association and contiguity, may serve both human and animal better.

Richard Wagner was a composer keenly aware of the state of his health and willing to go to great lengths to improve it. Like many Europeans of his era, Wagner often sought relief for his physical and mental afflictions at one of the region’s many spas. The basic principles of hydrotherapy dated back to Roman times, but the nineteenth century saw an explosion in the development of spa facilities and an accompanying profusion of professional and lay healers who proffered their healing methods to spa patrons of all classes. Offering a glimpse into the flourishing culture of water cures during Wagner’s time, this chapter illuminates key elements of the spa regimen, explores several of Wagner’s spa getaways and their curative aims, and weighs various views on diet, exercise, and hydrotherapeutic techniques promoted by nineteenth-century health advocates such as Vincenz Priessnitz and Sebastian Kneipp.

Plutarch is often seen nowadays as a champion of the animal cause, and virtually as a precursor of the modern pro-animal argument. It is important, however, to recognize that the prominence of animals in Plutarch’s work is symptomatic of the widespread and vibrant textual experimentation with animals in imperial Greco-Roman literature. The trend peaks in the second century AD, but animals were relevant within imperial philosophical thought too. Like many authors (and their ancient readers), Plutarch draws upon and responds to (a) the rich and abiding literary tradition of mobilizing animal imagery and themes and (b) the long-established philosophical debate on animal psychology and rationality, with far-reaching ethical implications about how animals should be treated. The chapter surveys the attitudes toward animals across the Plutarchan corpus and offers in-depth contextualization of the dialogues De sollertia animalium and the notoriously ironic Gryllus.

This chapter provides a summary of the deep-rooted connections between Canadian Doukhobors (Doukhobortsy or Spirit Wrestlers) and Tolstoy, starting with important anti-militaristic events organized by the Doukhobor leader Peter Verigin at the end of the nineteenth century: refusals to serve in the army and the Burning of the Weapons in Doukhobor villages in the Caucasus, Russian Empire. These events as well as the following severe persecutions of Doukhobors in Russia caught the attention of Tolstoy because this peasant anti-militaristic movement resembled his own peaceful non-resistance teachings. Tolstoy became one of the most passionate protectors and a dear friend of the Doukhobors, commending their pacifism in his works. The chapter describes the first encounter of a group of Doukhobors with Tolstoy, and Tolstoy’s friendship and correspondence with Peter Verigin, as well as the pivotal role played by Tolstoy in organizing and funding the Doukhobors’ immigration to Canada. In conclusion, the author points out a few other correspondences between Tolstoy’s teachings and Doukhobor beliefs, such as agrarianism, communal cultivation of land, the unity of people, and rejection of Church institutions and priests. The chapter highlights the significance of pacifism (as it is understood by Tolstoy and the Doukhobors) in contemporary context.

From the 1880s onward, a vigorous movement inspired by Tolstoy’s Christian anarchist thought developed both within the Russian Empire and internationally. This chapter traces the activity of Tolstoyan communities, publishing houses, societies, and newspapers, and considers the role they played in building and maintaining international Tolstoyan networks. It considers how Tolstoy’s thought was interpreted in different national contexts as well as how and why enthusiasm for Tolstoy’s ideas emerged or revived in specific periods: it also discusses some key debates and challenges that Tolstoyans confronted, and the ways these were debated both within the movement and in interactions with those outside it. Tolstoy’s focus on following one’s own conscience meant that he strongly objected to the idea of a movement in his name. But as this chapter makes clear, while Tolstoyans were always fiercely independent-minded, the ideas and causes around which they united gave them a strong sense of being part of a collective, wherever and whenever they were active.

This chapter presents a variety of arguments against factory farming and explores arguments that question the status quo notion that animals belong in the category of edible beings.

Over the course of more than a millennium, the ancient Greeks and Romans put hundreds of millions of animals to death in acts of sacrifice, yet also developed the first vegetarian literature and made animals subject to legal proceedings. This complex situation affected major trends in ancient philosophy, such as Pythagoreanism, and also ancient cosmological concepts. To some degree, philosophy and religious custom clashed with one another, and philosophers and other writers responded by trying to moderate, ignore or avoid this conflict. Missing from the ancient literature is any concept of animal rights. Scholarship on animal sacrifice, much of it fascinated by the subject of sacrificial violence, has given anthropological and zoological explanations for ancient practices, but has not reached a consensus on why sacrifice was widespread, or on how it fitted into ancient paganism as a whole. Recent writing on the rights and status of animals has only begun to influence scholarship.