Vegetarianism and Veganism in Literature from the Ancients to the Twenty-First Century, by Theophilus Savvas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024, viii + 254 pp., £85 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-009-28725-8

This review was published in Green Letters in October 2025

This confident, care-taking, sure-footed book is a major addition to critical animal studies, vegan literary studies, and therefore (through connections that Savvas makes clear) to ecocriticism. At its grandest, it is a meditation on the nature of literature as a human production, and how it can (or cannot but) contain the animal. Savvas casts his net wide, but also makes certain genres (such as utopian fiction, and the literature of women’s liberation) serve as foci. He selects not only literary works which contain avowed pro-vegetarian or pro-vegan affect and argument, but also ones which treat these practices and ideologies significantly, whether they support them unconsciously, partially or not at all. He addresses several of animal studies’ key authors (Shelley) and works (‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’) whilst having the confidence to leave on one side a few particularly well-discussed works (Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals), and to strike out into extended discussions of works which have hardly at all been discussed in relation to his themes (Graham Greene’s The Comedians).

As any work which treats the cultural position of vegetarianism and veganism must, the book often treats intersectionality. It notes, for example, that the American Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott conceived of vegetarianism as assisting female liberation on the grounds that the food concerned required less preparation – but that his daughter, Louisa May, felt the opposite to be the case (47). The book’s sensitive handling of gender is exemplified in the acknowledgment (denied by others) that Byron may have had anorexia (16). Its awareness of the possible tensions between progressive movements (as exemplified by what Savvas presents as Isaac Bashevis Singer’s misogyny (115)) yields a critique of Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat as simplistic in its alignment of vegetarianism with feminism. Towards the book’s end, it focuses increasingly on the factual, ontological and moral dimensions of comparing atrocities against people (such as the Holocaust) to those against animals (as proposed by Singer (110) and by Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello amongst others) via a ‘slippage between difference in species and difference of race in humans’ (101). It is by discussing this question in relation to literature that the book extends its scope to a fundamental assessment of the human/non-human-animal species boundary.

Such a grandeur of scope and achievement is of a different order to that promised by the book’s title. True, the phrase ‘the Ancients’, being both in English and Eurocentric, renders the concentration on British culture (and its American offshoot) unsurprising. But there is a difference between a thematic book that concentrates on literature in which the author has expertise without advertising this in its title, and one of which the title over-promises coverage of a field. A geographical qualifier such as ‘Western’ before ‘Literature’ would have helped (Savvas convincingly argues for his concentration on a part of the world where vegetarianism, not being the default, is perceived in terms of lack) (6). Likewise, in the dimension of time the concentration is on the eighteenth-century onwards. In four pages (20-24) we travel from Pythagoras through Judaism and Christianity to Thomas More. Even the seventeenth century, with its pioneering non-conformist vegetarian movements, is raced over (26), and the first text to be given extended attention is Gulliver’s Travels.

There is a dimension of the writing that matches the title’s rather flat, scholarly aspect. The introduction is at pains to claim that this is not a campaigning vegetarian work, merely one that analyses how important vegetarianism is to literature. Edward Bellamy’s Equality (1897) is criticised as demonstrating that ‘didacticism – here shorn of the qualifying satire of Butler, or the personal scepticism of Wells – can diminish the aesthetic achievement of the utopian novel’ (85). In an endnote Savvas assures us – regarding the comparisons made by others between the treatment of animals and the Holocaust – ‘Here I make no judgement about the ethical validity of the comparison’ (131). Yet in the book’s dazzling final chapter, Savvas declares himself in the following analysis:

the fictional works do not compare the treatment of animals in society at large to the treatment of humans during the Holocaust. Rather, those texts situate the Holocaust in terms of the human behaviour towards non-human animals in order to reveal something about the governing epistemology that seeks to legitimise both practices. This act of situation tells us something about the Holocaust, as well as revealing truths about the human use of non-human animals. This does not rely on a metaphorical drawing together of human and animal – and so does not relegate the animal to secondary element. Humans are not like animals and animals are not like humans; they cannot be conceived each of the other, because, fundamentally, they are examples of the same phenomenon … This points us towards metonymy [to escape the oppressive logic of metaphor]’ (213-14)

The book ends with an acknowledgment that ‘the underlying spirit traced in this book can be said to presuppose, and thus also to demand, full grievability for all animal life, human and non-human alike’ (215). Savvas also several times makes the point that ‘the choice to become vegan may well be the most political (personal) choice that an individual can now make’ (170), and ‘veganism as non-normative practice may constitute … perhaps the most potent protestation of capitalism any individual can make in the twenty-first century’ (11).

The result is that the book’s title both oversells its purview and undersells its philosophical and emotional power.

The distinction between ‘vegetarianism’ and ‘veganism’ might perhaps have been drawn more cleanly. Arguably, the former is an absolute dietary proscription which can have multiple motivations, whereas veganism is an ethical position demanding the minimisation of human harm towards animals in all forms. According to such definitions, writers had vegan feelings well before the invention of the term, quite apart from the fact (to which Savvas alludes) that the production of dairy products has increased exponentially in cruelty over the past century. Some important moments of definition, as well as valuable additional context, occur in endnotes, whilst other endnotes contain just references, meaning that many readers will not take the pot luck of routinely referring to them; for this reason I recommend reading them all together.

But these are cavils. This is a highly judicious, crystal-clear book which breaks important philosophical and literary-critical ground. It is aware of the limitations of all the disciplines that it touches on: ‘As philosophy and science have their limits, so, too, does literature’ (212). Running as a gleaming thread through the book is how the philosophy of vegetarianism and veganism ‘developed through a dialogic relationship between east and west’ (front page blurb), noting that the West’s vision of the east often had something fictional in it: ‘vegetarianism developed via a complicated oscillation between the facts and the fictions of the east in the western imaginary’ (4). Against this context, Savvas crisply retells the case of Gandhi’s reconversion to the practice of his ancestral religion by the likes of Henry Salt and the London Theosophists (6).

Admirably, Savvas does not pull authors and texts into the causes with which he is concerned any more than is warranted, and draws a careful distinction between sympathy for animals and vegetarianism per se; the discussion of Pope, for example, is finely nuanced (28). Savvas notes that the greater proximity that people used to have to animal slaughter (before the development of secluded slaughterhouses) seems not to have desensitized them; if anything, the opposite was the case – Shakespeare being an excellent example (51). He offers a particularly persuasive, judicious, and unexpected reading of Greene’s The Comedians and its evangelical vegetarian characters Mr and Mrs Smith. He notes wryly that the names of the couple’s vegetarian food substitutes, ‘Froment, Barmene, Yeastrel, Nuttoline, Slippery Elm Food – have less comic potential than Greene, who over-employs them, imagined (120). He concludes: ‘While the author was no doubt sceptical about the specifics of the Smiths’ belief, their commitment to it ensured that he drew them as the most content and admirable characters in the whole of Greeneland’ (128-9).

Savvas is right to assert that vegetarian/vegan/pro-animal thought and affect in literature have been underestimated precisely because many critics have lacked such thought and affect. They have not taken these things seriously by way of theme because they have not taken them seriously by way of ideology (8),  yet ‘these representations frequently are important for the literary texts qua literary texts’ (3). An openness to the moral and ontological claims of animals therefore allows readers to see things in literature that have been obscured by species prejudice, as well as to take part in that evolution of moral consciousness that will gather in force in the coming years, and will, in due course, make the year 2025 appear benighted indeed.