social or environmental conditions in which they appear are shown to be interrelated. Employing a 'prescriptive' analysis of various Romantic texts, especially Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813), Morton argues that the figurative rhetorical elements of these texts should be read not simply as clever language play, but as commands to establish consumptive practices that challenge ideological configurations of how the body relates to normativity. For Morton, authoritarian power dynamics, commodity flows, industrial logic, and the distinction between the domains of nature and culture are inhered in the 'discourses of diet' articulated by the Shelleys. In turn, Shelleyan prose regarding forms of consumption, particularly vegetarianism, is read as a call for social reform and figurative discussions of intemperance and intoxication as warnings against tyranny. Additionally, Morton has edited two critical volumes on the Shelleyan corpus. In 2002, they published a compilation of critical and historical reflections on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein entitled Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: A Routledge Study Guide and Sourcebook. Then, in 2006, Morton edited The Cambridge Companion to Shelley, an interdisciplinary overview of Percy Bysshe Shelley's themes, language, narrative structure, literary philosophy, and political views. Diet studies From 2000 to 2004, Morton published three works dealing with the intersection of food and cultural studies. In the first of these to be published, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (2000), Morton unpacked the evolution of European consumer culture through an analysis of the figurative use of spice in Romantic literature. Viewing spice as a cultural artifact that functioned "as discourse, not object, naively transparent to itself" during the Romantic period, they elucidate two general characteristics of the poetics of spice: materiality and transumption. The 'materiality' of spice connects its symbolic and social roles with its capacity for desire production. Morton cites the "trade winds topos" (perfumed breeze believed to waft from exotic lands in which spices are domestic) in Milton's Paradise Lost as an example, concluding that Milton prefigures the symbolic use of spice in later works by presenting Satan's journey from Hell to Chaos as a parallel to the travels of spice traders. In contrast, 'transumption', following Harold Bloom's deployment of the rhetorical concept, entails the use of a metasignifier that "serves as a figure for poetic language itself." According to Morton, the works of John Dryden exemplify transumption, revealing "a novel kind of capitalist poetics, relying on the representation of the spice