Man-Eating Monsters

Dina Khapaeva is Professor at the School of Modern Languages, the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research comprises death studies, cultural studies, historical memory and Russian studies. Her recent monographs include The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture (The University of Michigan Press, 2017), Nightmares: From Literary Experiments to Cultural Project (Brill, 2013).

• Foreword; Jacque Lynn Foltyn Introduction: Food for Monsters: Popular Culture and Our Basic Food Taboo; Dina Khapaeva Chapter 1. Antihumanism and Popular Culture; Dina Khapaeva Chapter 2. Terrapin; Paul Freedman Chapter 3. Transcendental Guilt and Eating Human Beings, or Levinas's Meeting with the Zombies; Sami Pihlström Chapter 4. Blue Books, Baedekers, Cookbooks, and the Monsters in the Mirror: Bram Stoker's Dracula; Carol SenfChapter 5. Edible Humans: Undermining the Human Subject in Zombie Films and Television; Kelly Doyle Chapter 6. The Soviet Cannibal: Who Eats Whom in Andrey Platonov's "Rubbish Wind"; Svetlana Tcareva

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.