Cannibal Tales: The Hunger for Conquest
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 1994
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year's Reith lecturer is the Booker prize-nominated author Marina Warner. A writer of fiction, criticism and history, her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of art, myths, symbols, and fairytales. Her series of Reith Lectures entitled 'Managing Monsters' explore how myths express and shape our attitudes.
In her penultimate lecture, Marina Warner explores myths of cannibalism from The Tempest to Hannibal Lecter. She argues that it is really only in the last decade that historical study has established how deeply fantasy has shaped the story and the chronicles of conquest. She explores how the imagery of forbidden ingestion masked other powerful longings and fears such as that of mingling and hybridity, fears about a future loss of identity and about the changes that history itself brings, and how their message of 'either we eat them or they eat us' helped to justify the presence of the invader, the settler and the trader bringing civilisation.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. |
| 0:04.7 | This lecture in the series Managing Monsters, given by Marina Warner, was originally broadcast in 1994. |
| 0:12.3 | In 1844, the great Victorian art historian and critic John Ruskin was bought a painting by his father as a reward for the success of his book, Modern Painters. |
| 0:22.4 | It was a picture by Turner, which Ruskin admired above all others, saying of it, |
| 0:27.5 | I believe if I were reduced to rest Turner's immortality upon any single work, I should choose this. |
| 0:34.8 | Ruskin kept the painting for nearly 25 years. |
| 0:38.3 | Until he found the subject, he said, |
| 0:40.3 | too painful and had to part with it. |
| 0:43.4 | Before that, he had evoked his Turner |
| 0:45.3 | in one of his most gorgeous hymns to the sublime. |
| 0:48.5 | Purple and blue, |
| 0:50.1 | the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers |
| 0:52.3 | are cast upon the mist of night, |
| 0:54.6 | advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship, |
| 0:58.3 | as it labours amidst the lightning of the sea, |
| 1:00.9 | its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, |
| 1:05.0 | girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, |
| 1:09.6 | and cast far along the desolate |
| 1:12.9 | heave of the supulchral waves incarnadines the multitude in a sea in all this |
| 1:20.3 | welter of praise Ruskin never tackled the subject of the painting at all it's |
| 1:26.1 | usually known as the slave ship but its full title is slavers throwing overboard, |
| 1:31.6 | the dead and dying, typhon coming on. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.