Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism

Giulia Champion is an Early Career Research and Teaching Fellow at the University of Warwick. Her PhD investigated the tropes of extraction and cannibalism as decolonial approaches to literature emerging from the American and African continents. She is currently working on transdisciplinary climate change communication, material histories and the blue and energy humanities.

Preface: Bites Here and There

Part I Cannibals with (Pitch)Forks

Introduction – A Severed Head on a Silver Platter: Bloody Banquets, Revenge Cannibalism and Future Foodways

Giulia Champion






‘I’ll play the cook’: Titus Andronicus and the Cannibalism of Revenge from Seneca to Julie Taymor’s Titus
Romola Nuttall




Cannibalism and Femininity: From the Old English Judith to Game of Thrones’ Arya Stark
Roberta Marangi




‘You eat or you die’: Sixth Extinction Cannibalism in Contemporary Speculative Fiction
Nora Castle

Part II The Anthropophagus Complex

Introduction – The Anthropophagus Complex: Despotic and Overbearing Ogre Figures in Ancient and Medieval Texts and in Psychoanalysis

Giulia Champion




Cannibalism and the Ancient Novel Revisited
Edmund P. Cueva




The Medieval Roots of Anthropophagy: Stereotypes, Metaphors and Practices
Angelica Aurora Montanari




Iconology and Metaphors in Viennese Actionism: Critical Actions against a Cannibalistic Society
Nicola Viviani




‘We’ve both been his brides’: NBC’s Hannibal, Cannibalism and Psychological Violence in Platonic Relationships
Shehzad Raj

Part III Not Just Another Piece of Meat

Introduction – Not Just Another Piece of Meat: The Sexual and Epistemological Violence of Gendered Otherness

Giulia Champion




Criminal Conversion and Cannibalistic Contrition in an Early Modern Spanish Broadsheet Ballad
Stacey L. Parker Aronson




Constructing Transgression: Cannibalism, Witchcraft and Womanhood in Lo Stregozzo
Laura Scalabrella Spada




The Better to Eat You With: The Anthropophagy Plots of Fairy Tales
Silvia E. Storti




Cannibalising Violence: Rethinking the Cannibal in order to Theorise an Unthinkability of Sexual Violence
Cecilia Cienfuegos and Ana Abril

Part IV (De)Meatifying and Digesting the Other

Introduction – Decolonising Cannibalism from Travel Writing to Brazilian Antropofagia




‘Savages are but shades of ourselves’: Central African Cannibals in Herbert Ward’s Narratives (1890-1910)
Sophie Dulucq




Gastronomes of the Old School: American Iterations of the Cannibal Idea
Nicholas A. B. Kahn




Neo-Cannibalistic Spaces: Revisiting Museum Practice through Literary Fiction
Louise Logan-Smith




The Ethnographic Effect or, Antropofagia, its Past and Future

Nelson Shuchmacher Endebo