Böcker av Carl Griffin

The 1840s witnessed widespread hunger and malnutrition at home and mass starvation in Ireland. And yet the aptly named 'Hungry 40s' came amidst claims that, notwithstanding Malthusian prophecies, absolute biological want had been eliminated in England. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were supposedly the period in which the threat of famine lifted for the peoples of England. But hunger remained, in the words of Marx, an 'unremitted pressure'. The politics of hunger offers the first systematic analysis of the ways in which hunger continued to be experienced and feared, both as a lived and constant spectral presence. It also examines how hunger was increasingly used as a disciplining device in new modes of governing the population. Drawing upon a rich archive, this innovative and conceptually-sophisticated study throws new light on how hunger persisted as a political and biological force.

It introduces each of Cyrillona's five surviving poems and examines their poetic form and genre, structure and rhetorical features, and critical questions of text, interpretation, and theology.

Rural workers in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England were not passive victims in the face of rapid social change. Locating protest in the wider contexts of work, poverty and landscape change, this new text offers the first critical overview of this growing area of study.