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"People, international agencies and governments are increasingly concerned about the nature of our food, where it comes from, and the conditions in which it is produced. By close reading of a wide sweep of historical literature, including works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats and George Eliot, Food and the Literary Imagination shows that such anxieties are nothing new, and that we are not confronting them alone. Too often, we engage with our rural, worked environments through the lens of apparently sentimental and incidental literary representations. The book recovers lost understandings of the materiality of life and sustenance for the authors and their first readers"--
List of contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on the Authors List of abbreviations Notes on Literary Texts and Note on Usage Prologue. Food Security and the Literary Imagination 1. Food Matters 2. The Field in Time 3. Chaucer's Pilgrims and a Medieval Game of Food 4. Remembering the Land in Shakespeare's Plays 5. Keats's Ode 'To Autumn': Touching the Stubble Plains 6. The Mill in Time: George Eliot and the New Agronomy Epilogue. The Literary Imagination and the Future of Food Notes and References Select Bibliography Index
About the author
Jayne Elisabeth Archer was a Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University, between 2005 and 2014. Her research interests are alchemy, science and the pseudo-sciences in early modern literature – especially literature by and for women.
Richard Marggraf Turley is Professor of English Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University. He is the author of several monographs on Romanticism, including Bright Stars: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic Literary Culture (2009). He is also the author of a novel set in the Romantic period, The Cunning House (2015).
Howard Thomas is Emeritus Professor of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences at Aberystwyth University. His research interests include the genetics, evolution and uses of food plants. He also has a special interest in the cultural significance of scientific research and promotion of links between science and the arts. He is co-author of The Molecular Life of Plants (2013).
Report
"Food and the Literary Imagination also enables a different and sometimes a startling understanding of our concepts of literary as well as of commodity production. ... it is a surprisingly engaging read, written with clarity, ease and obvious passion. It is a timely and provocative alternative view of canonical texts and contexts which should prove an invaluable resource for historical and literary ecocritics." (Sue Edney, Green Letters, Vol. 20 (1), 2016)
