Eating Their Words: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity

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Kristen Guest
SUNY Press, Sep 6, 2001 - Social Science - 219 pages
Linking cannibalism to issues of difference crucial to contemporary literary criticism and theory, the essays included here cover material from a variety of contexts and historical periods and approach their subjects from a range of critical perspectives. Along with such canonical works as The Odyssey, The Faerie Queene, and Robinson Crusoe, the contributors also discuss lesser known works, including a version of the Victorian melodrama Sweeny Todd, as well as contemporary postcolonial and postmodern novels by Margaret Atwood and Ian Wedde. Taken together, these essays re-theorize the relationship between cannibalism and cultural identity, making cannibalism meaningful within new critical and cultural horizons.

Contributors include Mark Buchan, Santiago Colas, Marlene Goldman, Brian Greenspan, Kristen Guest, Minaz Jooma, Robert Viking O'Brien, Geoffrey Sanborn, and Julia M. Wright.

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Contents

Introduction Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Identity KRISTEN GUEST
1
Food for Thought Achilles and the Cyclops
11
Cannibalism in Edmund Spensers Faerie Queene Ireland and the Americas
35
Robinson Crusoe Incorporates Domestic Economy Incest and the Trope of Cannibalism
57
Devouring the DisinheritedFamilial Cannibalism in Maturins Melmoth the Wanderer
79
Are You Being Served? Cannibalism Class and Victorian Melodrama
107
From Caliban to CronusA Critique of Cannibalism as Metaphor for Cuban Revolutionary Culture
129
Cannibals at the Core Juicy Rumors and the Hollow Earth Chronotope in Ian Weddes Symmes Hole
149
Margaret Atwoods Wilderness Tips Apocalyptic Cannibal Fiction
167
The Missed EncounterCannibalism and the Literary Critic
187
Contributors
205
Index
207
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About the author (2001)

Kristen Guest is Lecturer at the University of Toronto at Scarborough.

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