What art and poetry can teach us about food security
Richard Marggraf Turley |
TEDxAberystwyth
• October 2017
The Hay Wain (1821) by English Romantic painter John Constable famously depicts a calm, leisurely scene of rural life set in beautiful Suffolk landscape. Challenging that view in his revealing talk, Professor Richard Marggraf Turley, a specialist in Romantic Studies, shows how Constable’s famous painting in fact struggles – and fails – to keep its awareness of hunger, exploitative labour and violent uprising out of frame. This talk connects Constable’s much-loved work of art with current urgent debates around food security. It ends with a reading of English Romantic poet John Keats’s ode “To Autumn” (1819), and shows how that poem, like Constable’s painting, is radically involved in the food politics of the era.
Professor Richard Marggraf Turley teaches at Aberystwyth University, Wales: https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/english/staff-profiles/listing/profile/rcm