Objects of fear and fascination, cannibals have long signified an elemental "otherness," an existence outside the bounds of normalcy. In the American imagination, the figure of the cannibal has evolved tellingly over time, as Jeff Berglund shows in this study encompassing a strikingly eclectic collection of cultural, literary, and cinematic texts. Cannibal Fictions brings together two discrete periods in U.S. history: the years between the Civil War and World War I, the high-water mark in America's imperial presence, and the post-Vietnam era, when the nation was beginning to seriously question its own global agenda. Berglund shows how P. T. Barnum, in a traveling exhibit featuring so-called "Fiji cannibals," served up an alien "other" for popular consumption, while Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Tarzan of the Apes series tapped into similar anxieties about the eruption of foreign elements into a homogeneous culture. Turning to the last decades of the twentieth century, Berglund considers how treatments of cannibalism variously perpetuated or subverted racist, sexist, and homophobic ideologies rooted in earlier times. Fannie Flagg's novel Fried Green Tomatoes invokes cannibalism to new effect, offering an explicit critique of racial, gender, and sexual politics (an element to a large extent suppressed in the movie adaptation). Recurring motifs in contemporary Native American writing suggest how Western expansion has, cannibalistically, laid the seeds of its own destruction. And James Dobson's recent efforts to link the pro-life agenda to allegations of cannibalism in China testify still further to the currency and pervasiveness of this powerful trope. By highlighting practices that preclude the many from becoming one, these representations of cannibalism, Berglund argues, call into question the comforting national narrative of e pluribus unum.

The Cannibal was John Hawkes's first novel, published in 1949. "No synopsis conveys the quality of this now famous novel about an hallucinated Germany in collapse after World War II. John Hawkes, in his search for a means to transcend outworn modes of fictional realism, has discovered a a highly original technique for objectifying the perennial degradation of mankind within a context of fantasy.... Nowhere has the nightmare of human terror and the deracinated sensibility been more consciously analyzed than in The Cannibal. Yet one is aware throughout that such analysis proceeds only in terms of a resolutely committed humanism." - Hayden Carruth

“Unlike me, life isn’t always pretty,” says Tiffany Spratt—a cheerleader destined for fame who will do anything to get there Tiffany is definitely glad that the best-looking boy in the universe just transferred to her high school. Her boyfriend, Wally, got caught hacking into the Pentagon’s computer system and was sent to boarding school, so she almost didn’t have a date for the Homecoming dance! But Tiffany knows that she’ll look fabulous next to her new boyfriend, Cannibal MacLaine—at least she thinks he said his name was Cannibal. Sure, it’s an incredibly unusual name, but then, he is from Los Angeles. Then something even more exciting happens: A major Hollywood director wants to film a horror movie right in their school! Not everyone is as pleased as Tiffany though—in fact, her own mother is leading protests against the plan—but Tiffany is Head Yell Leader at Hi High, so she gets the chamber of commerce on her side. The movie studio signs the contract, and everything is going to be perfect . . . if it doesn’t turn into a perfect nightmare first.

"They raped me and ate my friend alive." Thus starts this work of erotic horror fiction filled with 'sacrilege, blasphemy, and crime' -- written in a style that is part H P Lovecraft, part Marquis de Sade, and part Octave Mirbeau -- "The Cannibal Within" is literally 'wet with sin, slippery with blood, and slimy with fornication.' The novel's central character is part Lara Croft part Sarah Connor. She/We has a choice: the evil may be patiently borne or savagely resisted. We may think we are special -- holy, honoured, valued -- God's chosen primates -- but that is a fraud. The dupes of superhuman forces, we are misfits and abominations. We have no higher purpose -- no saviour god died for our sins--we exist, only because our masters are infatuated with our meat.

A comprehensive study of cannibalism in literature and film, spanning colonial fiction, Gothic texts and contemporary American horror. Amidst the sharp teeth and horrific appetite of the cannibal, this book examines real fears of over-consumerism and consumption that trouble an ever-growing modern world.

Postcolonial and diaspora studies scholars and critics have paid increasing attention to the use of metaphors of food, eating, digestion, and various affiliated actions such as loss of appetite, indigestion, and regurgitation. As such stylistic devices proliferated in the works of non-Western women writers, scholars connected metaphors of eating and consumption to colonial and imperial domination. In Cannibal Writes, Njeri Githire concentrates on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of these visceral metaphors of consumption in works by women writers from Haiti, Jamaica, Mauritius, and elsewhere. Employing theoretical analysis and insightful readings of English- and French-language texts, she explores the prominence of alimentary-related tropes and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, global geopolitics and economic dynamics, and migration. As she shows, the use of cannibalism in particular as a central motif opens up privileged modes for mediating historical and sociopolitical issues. Ambitiously comparative, Cannibal Writes ranges across the works of well-known and lesser known writers to tie together two geographic and cultural spaces that have much in common but are seldom studied in parallel.