Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism

This book brings together a range of works exploring the evolution of cannibalism, literally and metaphorically, diachronically and across disciplines. This collection of thoughtful and though-provoking scholarly contributions sheds light on and suggests the important of cannibalism in understanding human history and social relations.

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

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