Man-Eating Monsters: Anthropocentrism and Popular Culture

Dina Khapaeva
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA


Product Details
Format:
Hardback
ISBN:
9781787695283
Published:
Publisher:
Emerald Publishing Limited
Dimensions:
136 pages - 152 x 229mm
Series:
Emerald Studies in Death and Culture
List price £67.99 List price €82.99 List price $104.99

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What role do man-eating monsters - vampires, zombies, werewolves and cannibals - play in contemporary culture? This book explores the question of whether recent representations of humans as food in popular culture characterizes a unique moment in Western cultural history and suggests a new set of attitudes toward people, monsters, animals, and death. 

This volume analyzes how previous epochs represented man-eating monsters and cannibalism. Cultural taboos across the world are explored and brought into perspective whilst we contemplate how the representations of humans as commodities can create a global atmosphere that creeps towards cannibalism as a norm. 

This book also explores the links between the role played by the animal rights movement in problematizing the difference between humans and nonhuman animals. Instead of looking at the relations between food, body, and culture, or the ways in which media images of food reach out to various constituencies and audiences, as some existing studies do, this collection is focused on the crucial question, of how and why popular culture representations diffuse the borders between monsters, people, and animals, and how this affects our ideas about what may and may not be eaten.

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 Senf
Chapter 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
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).

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