Man-Eating Monsters

Contributed by language and literature, sociology, history, religion, and Gothic studies scholars from North America, the six essays in this collection explore the relationship between monstrosity and food, particularly the role of human-eating monsters in Western culture; how contemporary monsters differ from their cultural predecessors; the relationship between the rising interest in cannibals and the fascination with food as a subject of research and popular plot catalyst; and whether these new cultural developments influence the basic food taboo of eating humans. They consider the question of whether recent representations of humans as food in popular culture and academic discourse signify new attitudes towards humans, monsters, and animals, and the cultural patterns that explain why cannibals, vampires, and zombies have emerged as a new cultural idols at the turn of the 21st century. Chapters address the cultural and intellectual context that has made pop culture representations of people as food possible; monsters and their surrounding philosophical tradition; what can be regarded as monstrous food and how the quality of being monstrous may add to the recognition of food as delicious; the use of food in Bram Stoker's Dracula; cannibalism in Soviet literature of the 1930s, particularly Andrey Platonov's Rubbish Wind; and how the figure of the zombie in The Walking Dead and other television shows questions the idea of the human. Distributed in North America by Turpin Distribution.