This project is a case study in cultural hybrid vigour. As well as contributions to numerous symposia, workshops and lecture events, there have been twelve substantial publications – listed below, with links to reprints where available. And we may not be finished yet.
H Thomas, J E Archer, R Marggraf Turley. 2016. Remembering darnel, a forgotten plant of literary, religious and evolutionary significance. Journal of Ethnobiology 36: 29-44 [Read/download]
H Thomas, R Marggraf Turley, J E Archer. 2016. The millers’ tales: sustainability, the arts and the watermill. In: Literature and Sustainability (eds L Squire, A Johns-Putra, J Parham) Manchester: University Press (in press)
J E Archer, R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas. 2015. “Soper at oure aller cost”: the politics of food supply in the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer Review 50: 1-29 [Read/download]
Abstract: The reward for the best storyteller among the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a meal: “soper at oure aller cost” (I 799). This narrative detail gives tangible form to the traditional association between literary creation and arable farming. Chaucer’s diverse pilgrims and the tales they tell are woven together by the language, tropes, and contemporary concerns relating to anxieties about the production, supply, distribution, purity, and quality of food. Focusing on the figure of the Plowman, the apocryphal Plowman’s Tale, and the Reeve’s Tale, and reading them in the context of sociopolitical and religious dissent (the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt and Lollardy respectively), this essay traces the ways in which the Canterbury Tales engages with the politics and poetics of food supply in the final decades of the fourteenth century.
J E Archer, R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas. 2015. “Moving accidents by flood and field”: The arable and tidal worlds of George Eliot’s ‘The Mill on the Floss’. English Literary History 82: 701-728 [Read/download] http://sidthomas.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/82.2.archer.pdf
J E Archer, R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas. 2014. Reading Shakespeare with the grain: sustainability and the hunger business. Green Letters 19: 8-20 [Read/download]
J Archer, R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas. 2014. Food and the Literary Imagination. London: Palgrave
JE Archer, R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas. 2013. Reading with the Grain: Sustainability and the Literary Imagination. INSPIRE-ASLE-UKI Essay Competition Winner [Read/download]
R Marggraf Turley, JE Archer, H Thomas. 2012. On St Giles Hill. Keats’s Ode ‘to Autumn’ in the Market. Times Literary Supplement No. 5723 (5 December 2012) pp 14-15
R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas, JE Archer. 2012. Keats, ‘To Autumn’, and the New Men of Winchester. Review of English Studies 63: 797-817 [Read/download]
JE Archer, H Thomas, R Marggraf Turley. 2012. The Autumn King: remembering the land in King Lear. Shakespeare Quarterly 63: 518-543 [Read/download]
H Thomas, J Archer, R Marggraf Turley. 2011. Evolution, physiology and phytochemistry of the psychotoxic arable mimic weed darnel (Lolium temulentum L). Progress in Botany 72: 73-104 [Read/download]
R Marggraf Turley, H Thomas, J E Archer. 2010. A tragedy of idle weeds. Times Literary Supplement No. 5577 (19 February 2010) pp 14-15 [Read/download]