Abstract
This book is an extremely rich dish. Every chapter a portion making you want more, every sentence crisp – the way a book of academic criticism should be, with implications beyond the academy to the very heart of the global environmental crises we face now. The authors draw from their diverse areas of expertise, from early modern literature and the scientific milieu of the time, to the culture of Romanticism, to the biological, environmental, and rural sciences relating to food. They have achieved a collective voice that is learned, meticulous, spirited, and willing to take the kind of mental risks that lead to true originality. Methodologically, the approach, at first glance, would seem new historicist: take timeless figures from English literary history – Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats, and George Eliot – and show how these authors and the texts they produced are implicated in complicated, and critically relevant, webs of signification that have been lost in the onward march of time.
The book delivers on the promise, though, in ways that have made newspaper headlines. Witness the media controversy stirred up by The Sunday Times’s exposure of Shakespeare as a tax dodger and profiteer in time of famine, having been hauled before the courts for illegally stockpiling food, an account based on archival research from this book and printed under the scarehead ‘Bad Bard’. But that is a single nugget from a study that is full of surprises. The reader will delight to find canonically central works in all genres, from narrative poetry to drama to lyric to the novel (or say: The Canterbury Tales, to King Lear, to Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’, to The Mill on the Floss) opened up in entirely new ways, a claim often made but hardly ever justified. There is even an outstanding reading of John Constable’s painting ‘The Hay Wain’ thrown in for good measure. Here, the quintessential emblem of this nostalgic aesthetic becomes a record of fraught relationships and rural anxieties about economic change in systems of food production and distribution, suggesting related upheavals in traditional means of land management, all situated right there on the property of Constable’s mill-operating father, a rich landowner. The evidence is always right there, under one’s nose, if often a bit out of frame.
The authors have been patient in their marshalling of historical facts, and indeed the chapters of the book unfold with the suspense and excitement of a good detective novel. Who knew that Keats, for instance, was standing atop a hill, specifically St. Giles’s Hill outside Winchester, flanked on one side by preparations for the annual country fair (‘stalls being dressed, cider pressed, and crops and produce gathered for sale’) and on the other by cornfields when he composed his most famous poem? What we see when we look closely is a poet in severe economic distress, concerned with the fate of his work in the literary marketplace and caught in the balance between two symbolic worlds: the pastoral world of milkmaids and ancient rituals (call it the ideational space of Old England) and the speculative, arable world of increasingly mechanized labor on land recently purchased from the church by a banker. On one side, the mythological cornucopia of a deified Autumn; on the other, the privatization of food production in a post-war era of food scarcity and bread riots, the exportation of grain to more lucrative markets, and the alienation of people from the land, leading, eventually, to the conversion of fields into car parks. ‘Keats stands at the still centre, the fulcrum’, And so too, now, does his ode.
Food and the Literary Imagination aims, in the end, to spur creative engagement with the agricultural and environmental problems we face and to push literary works directly to the center of current debate as examples and prompts for discussion. It theorizes and makes sense of its own interdisciplinarity, as it does of its method. I can find much that makes this book important and little in it to criticize. I did find, however, one typo, the absence of Charles Wentworth Dilke from the index, the confusion of Saturn devouring his son with Satan (p. 5), and a missed opportunity there in aligning the womb with the tomb, as the stomach, after all, was a carnivore, a sarcophagus.