Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism

Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism: Bites Here and There brings together a range of works exploring the evolution of cannibalism, literally and metaphorically, diachronically and across disciplines. This edited collection aims to promote a conversation on the evolution and the different uses of the tropes and figures of cannibalism, in order to understand and deconstruct the fascination with anthropophagy, its continued afterlife and its relation to different disciplines and spaces of discourse. In order to do so, the contributing authors shed a new light not only on the concept, but also propose to explore cannibalism through new optics and theories. Spanning 15 chapters, the collection explores cannibalism across disciplines and fields from Antiquity to contemporary speculative fiction, considering history, anthropology, visual and film studies, philosophy, feminist theories, psychoanalysis and museum practices. This collection of thoughtful and thought-provoking scholarly contributions suggests the importance of cannibalism in understanding human history and social relations.

Preface: Bites Here and There
Part I Cannibals with (Pitch)Forks
Introduction - A Severed Head on a Silver Platter: Bloody Banquets, Revenge Cannibalism and Future Foodways
Giulia Champion

1. 'I'll play the cook': Titus Andronicus and the Cannibalism of Revenge from Seneca to Julie Taymor's Titus
Romola Nuttall


2. Cannibalism and Femininity: From the Old English Judith to Game of Thrones' Arya Stark
Roberta Marangi


3. 'You eat or you die': Sixth Extinction Cannibalism in Contemporary Speculative Fiction
Nora Castle
Part II The Anthropophagus Complex
Introduction - The Anthropophagus Complex: Despotic and Overbearing Ogre Figures in Ancient and Medieval Texts and in Psychoanalysis
Giulia Champion


4. Cannibalism and the Ancient Novel Revisited
Edmund P. Cueva


5. The Medieval Roots of Anthropophagy: Stereotypes, Metaphors and Practices
Angelica Aurora Montanari


6. Iconology and Metaphors in Viennese Actionism: Critical Actions against a Cannibalistic Society
Nicola Viviani


7. 'We've both been his brides': NBC's Hannibal, Cannibalism and Psychological Violence in Platonic Relationships
Shehzad Raj
Part III Not Just Another Piece of Meat
Introduction - Not Just Another Piece of Meat: The Sexual and Epistemological Violence of Gendered Otherness
Giulia Champion


8. Criminal Conversion and Cannibalistic Contrition in an Early Modern Spanish Broadsheet Ballad
Stacey L. Parker Aronson


9. Constructing Transgression: Cannibalism, Witchcraft and Womanhood in Lo Stregozzo
Laura Scalabrella Spada


10. The Better to Eat You With: The Anthropophagy Plots of Fairy Tales
Silvia E. Storti


11. Cannibalising Violence: Rethinking the Cannibal in order to Theorise an Unthinkability of Sexual Violence
Cecilia Cienfuegos and Ana Abril
Part IV (De)Meatifying and Digesting the Other
Introduction - Decolonising Cannibalism from Travel Writing to Brazilian Antropofagia


12. 'Savages are but shades of ourselves': Central African Cannibals in Herbert Ward's Narratives (1890-1910)
Sophie Dulucq


13. Gastronomes of the Old School: American Iterations of the Cannibal Idea
Nicholas A. B. Kahn


14. Neo-Cannibalistic Spaces: Revisiting Museum Practice through Literary Fiction
Louise Logan-Smith


15. The Ethnographic Effect or, Antropofagia, its Past and Future

Nelson Shuchmacher Endebo