Reading Veganism

Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present focuses on the iteration of the trope 'the monstrous vegan' across two hundred years of Anglophone literature. Explicating, through such monsters, veganism's relation to utopian longing and challenge to the conceptual category of the 'human,' the book explores ways in which ethical identities can be written, represented, and transmitted. Reading Veganism proposes that we can recognise and identify the monstrous vegan in relation to four key traits. First, monstrous vegans do not eat animals, an abstinence that generates a seemingly inexplicable anxiety in those who encounter them. Second, they are hybrid assemblages of human and nonhuman animal parts, destabilising existing taxonomical classifications. Third, monstrous vegans are sired outside of heterosexual reproduction, the product of male acts of creation. Andfinally, monstrous vegans are intimately connected to acts of writing and literary creation. The principle contention of the book is that understandings of veganism, as identity and practice, are limited without a consideration of multiplicity, provisionality, failure, and insufficiency within vegan definitionand lived practice. Veganism's association with positivity, in its drive for health and purity, is countered by a necessary and productive negativity generated by a recognition of the horrors of the modern world. Vegan monsters rehearse the key paradoxes involved in the writing of vegan identity.

The impact of Reading Veganism goes far beyond the works that Quinn studies, inviting further reparative vegan readings, and raising questions about the purported stability of human subjectivities. Quinn asks her readers to reckon with how they construct and enact identities of consumption; Reading Veganism offers new ways of recognizing and acknowledging the power dynamics in our entanglements with nonhuman animals., Emelia Quinn's recent monograph The Monstrous Vegan: Reading Veganism in Literature, 1818 to Present is both timely and theoretically refreshing as the field of Vegan Studies continues to distinguish itself and calls for its own space as culturally and historically significant as well as markedly unique from contemporary conceptions of Animal Studies more generally.

Emelia Quinn is a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Amsterdam. Prior to this post she completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford. Her work establishes the emergent field of vegan theory and considers its intersections with queer theory, animal studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonial studies. She is co-editor of Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Her mostrecent article "Notes on Vegan Camp" is published in PMLA (2020).