TY - JOUR
AU1 - Latham, Rob
AB -  R O B L AT H A M Priscilla L. Walton, Our Cannibals, Ourselves. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. x + 172 pp. $35.00. "F rom serial killers to disease narratives to organ transplants to the spread of mad cow disease, flesh-eating (in one form or another) pervades twentieth- and twenty-first-century existence," Priscilla Walton asserts in her book Our Cannibals, Ourselves (152). As this disparate list suggests, Walton's focus is less on literal cannibalistic acts and practices than it is on "diffuse and metaphoric" (28) deployments of anthropophagous imagery throughout contemporary popular culture. In seven brief yet wide-ranging chapters, Walton surveys cannibal symbolism in classic literary and travel narratives, in coverage of modern pandemics such as Ebola fever, in popular alien-invasion and vampire stories, in panics over mad cow disease, in representations of eating disorders, in serial killers narratives, and in contemporary consumer culture generally, dominated as it is by "various media frenzies and the compulsion to devour" (7). Many of the connections Walton makes, and a number of her readings of what is admittedly an impressively broad range of materials, are quite arresting, but her tendency to treat cannibalism in such a flexible way, to find 
TI - Cannibals and Kitchen Sinks
JF - Contemporary Literature
DA - 2006-01-03
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/university-of-wisconsin-press/cannibals-and-kitchen-sinks-k0ws1s04fM
SP - 502
EP - 504
VL - 47
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
ER -