| Description |
1 online resource (xv, 233 pages) |
| Physical Medium |
polychrome |
| Description |
text file |
| Note |
"A Ray and Pat Browne book"--Ser. title page. |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-225) and index. |
| Contents |
P.T. Barnum's American Exhibition of Fiji Cannibals (1871-1873) -- Literacy, Imperialism, Race and Cannibalism in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes -- The Cannibal at Home: The Secret of Fried Green Tomatoes -- Turning Back the Cannibal: Indigenous Revisionism in the Late Twentieth Century. |
| Summary |
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. |
| Access |
Use copy Restrictions unspecified MiAaHDL |
| Reproduction |
Electronic reproduction. [S.l.] : HathiTrust Digital Library, 2010. MiAaHDL |
| System Details |
Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL |
| Processing Action |
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve MiAaHDL |
| Local Note |
eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America |
| Subject |
American fiction -- History and criticism.
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American fiction. |
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Cannibalism in literature.
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Cannibalism in literature. |
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Literature and society -- United States.
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Literature and society. |
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United States. |
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Imperialism in literature.
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Imperialism in literature. |
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Sex role in literature.
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Sex role in literature. |
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Race in literature.
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Race in literature. |
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Sex in literature.
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Sex in literature. |
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Cannibalism.
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Cannibalism. |
| Chronological Term |
Geschichte 1870-2000 |
| Genre/Form |
Electronic books.
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Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Other Form: |
Print version: Berglund, Jeff. Cannibal fictions. Madison, Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press, ©2006 0299215903 (DLC) 2005022820 (OCoLC)61463562 |
| ISBN |
9780299215934 (electronic book) |
|
0299215938 (electronic book) |
|
1282764136 |
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9781282764132 |
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0299215903 |
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0299215946 |
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9780299215903 |
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9780299215941 |
|
