Foods of the Gods

Eating and the Eaten in Fantasy and Science Fiction

By: Gary Westfahl (Editor), George Slusser (Editor), Eric S. Rabkin (Editor)

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Hardcover | 1 September 1996

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Gluttony and starvation, pleasure and pain, growth and decay. These and other extremes of our condition related to food, though all but banned from the "civilized" tables of mainstream fiction, are ideal topics for the "undomesticated," free-roaming modes of fantasy.

As acts and ideas, food and eating are fundamental to all that makes us human and dominate our symbolic realms of art, literature, and cuisine. These essays show us the power of speculative modes of fiction to help us look anew at prehistorical and psychomythical attitudes toward food and eating; historical Western-cultural attitudes toward the material fact of food and the necessity of eating; and the relationship between attitudes toward food and how, how much, when, and where we eat.

The contributors come from a variety of backgrounds, including anthropology, film, and French, Russian, English, and medieval literature. Ranging in their focus from shamans to cannibals, utopias to social Darwinism, muscle magazines to supermarket tabloids, the contributors discuss the theory and practice of science fictional eating; the dialectic, at the level of eating, between individual needs and collective norms; and the ways that eating habits and the availability and choice of food serve to contextualize and demarcate modern fictional genres. In addition to discussing such writers as C. S. Lewis, Stephen King, Octavia Butler, Jonathan Swift, and Anne Rice, the contributors also consider such films as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast.

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Non-Fiction Literature, Poetry & Plays History & Criticism of Literature Literary Studies of Fiction General Literary Studies Arts & Entertainment Film, TV & Radio Specific Films

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Of Food, Gods, and Men: The Theory and Practice of Science Fictional Eating	p. 1
Eat and Grow Strong: The Super-Natural Power of Forbidden Fruit	p. 21
Shamanic Manipulation of Conspecifics: An Analysis of the Prehistory and Ethnohistory of Hallucinogens and Psychological Legerdemain	p. 39
The Solitary Easter in Science Fiction and Horror	p. 56
Indiana Jones the Temple of Doom: Bad Medicine	p. 76
Watching the Forbidden Feast: Monstrous Appetites, Secret Meals, and Spectatorial Pleasures in Cocteau, Rice, and Butler	p. 86
The Fine Reality of Hunger Satisfied: Food and Desire in C. S. Lewis's Perelandra	p. 97
Sitting Down to the Sacramental Feast: Food and Cultural Diversity in The Lord of the Rings	p. 117
Cannibalism in Science Fiction	p. 142
Consuming Horror: Richard Bachmans' Thinner, Stephen King's Dark Half, or, Just Desserts	p. 160
Eating Your Way to the Top: Social Darwinism in SF	p. 172
Utopia and the Art of the Visceral Response	p. 188
Alimentary, My Dear Watson: Food and Eating in Scientific and Mystery Fiction	p. 200
For Tomorrow We Dine: The Sad Gourmet at the Scienticafe	p. 213
Ain't No Fiber in Cyberspace: A Metonymic Menu for a Paratactic Potpourri	p. 224
Contributors	p. 237
Index	p. 239
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Foods of the Gods

Eating and the Eaten in Fantasy and Science Fiction

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