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.

The seat of the soul, the center of legends, the pulsing middle of cults and cultural taboos: the heart has a history as long and complex, and often as sordid, as that of the secret life it once signified. And this is the history that Milad Doueihi tells in a book that follows the adventures of the human heart through custom, legend, religion, and literature from antiquity to early modern times.

Most prominent, and macabre, in this history is the account of the eaten heart, beginning with the myth of Dionysos, who was kidnapped and devoured by the Titans. Doueihi shows us, from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century, strange tales combining a cuisine of the macabre with the devotion of the lover, in which a jealous husband serves his unwitting wife the heart of her murdered lover. Beyond the tensions of courtly love, manifest in the Lai d'Ignaure, the Roman du Chatelain du Coucy, and works by Dante and Boccaccio, Doueihi evokes the image of the devoured heart invoked in Francis Bacon's Essay on Friendship.

Not to be outdone by literature and legend, religion, particularly in the theology of the Sacred Heart, takes its place in this story, exerting its influence on the legend of the eaten heart, with stories of perverse consumption coming to be explained in terms of the mystery of the Eucharist, the magical and mystical consumption of the body of Christ. Finally, with the discovery of physiology and the emerging science of blood circulation, the heart loses its symbolic place--though Doueihi leaves us with the possible marriage of mysticism and science that Pascal's descriptions of intuitive intelligence open up for the heart.