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.

Jeff Berglund is assistant professor of English at Northern Arizona University.

<table of contents, p. ix>
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments	000
Introduction	000
Part I
	Chapter 1
		P.T. Barnum's American Exhibition of Fiji Cannibals (1871¿1873)	000
	Chapter 2
		Literacy, Imperialism, Race and Cannibalism in Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of 	
		the Apes	000
Part II
	Chapter 3
		The Cannibal at Home: The Secret of Fried Green Tomatoes	000
	Chapter 4
		Turning Back the Cannibal: Indigenous Revisionism in the Late Twentieth 	
		Century	000
Epilogue: Abortion Politics, Focus on the Family and U.S. Feminists in Beijing: Race, Nation, 
Gender, and Sexuality 	000
Bibliography	000
Index	000