Abstract

Victor Frankenstein’s iconic creation in Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein, the “Beast People” of H. G. Wells’s 1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau, and the genetically modified Crakers that populate Margaret Atwood’s 2003–2013 MaddAddam trilogy: across 200 years of Anglophone literature, the story of the monstrous vegan proliferates. Quinn’s essay engages in a close-reading of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, arguing that veganism undergoes a radical deconstruction and reformulation within the novels. Unpacking the numerous allusions to a wide body of vegetarian and vegan philosophy and thought within the texts, from the Ancient Greeks to the fiction of Shelley and Wells, this essay rethinks ideas about narrative transmission and the reproduction of literary veganism.