Document Type

Article

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

6. HUMANITIES, General literature studies, 6.5 OTHER HUMANITIES

Publication Details

Presented at conference Craving Planet Earth: Food in Culture Past, Present and Future at Lucien Blaga University, Sibiu, Romania in November 2019.

Published in journal East-West Cultural Passage, 19 (2), December 2019.

Abstract

Nobel-prize winning poet Seamus Heaney is celebrated for his rich verses recalling his home in the Northern Irish countryside of County Derry. Yet while the imaginative links to nature in his poetry have already been critically explored, little attention has been paid so far to his rendering of local food and foodways. From ploughing, digging potatoes and butter-churning to picking blackberries, Heaney sketches not only the everyday activities of mid-20th century rural Ireland, but also the social dynamics of community and identity and the socio-cultural symbiosis embedded in those practices. Larger questions of love, life and death also infiltrate the scenes, as they might in life, through hints of sectarian divisions and memories of famine.

This essay proposes a gastrocritical reading of Heaney's poetry to study these topics in particularly meaningful ways. Gastrocriticism is a nascent critical approach to literature that applies the insights gained in Food Studies to literary writings, investigating the relationship of humans to each other and to nature as played out through the prism of food, or as Heaney wrote: "Things looming large and at the same time [...] pinned down in the smallest detail".

DOI

https://doi.org/10.2478/ewcp-2019-0010

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