ABSTRACT

This collection of scholarly essays presents new work from an emerging line of inquiry: modern outlaw narratives and the textual and cultural relevance of food and feasting. Food, its preparation and its consumption, is presented in outlaw narratives as central points of human interaction, community, conflict, and fellowship. Feast scenes perform a wide variety of functions, serving as cultural repositories of manners and behaviors, catalysts for adventure, or moments of regrouping and redirecting narratives. The book argues that modern outlaw narratives illuminate a potent cross-cultural need for freedom, solidarity, and justice, and it examines ways in which food and feasting are often used to legitimate difference, create discord, and manipulate power dynamics.

chapter |11 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|16 pages

‘Bred Up a Butcher’

The Meat Trade and Its Connection with Criminality in Eighteenth-Century England

chapter 2|28 pages

The Fare of ‘Sanguinary Devils’

Feast and Storytelling in The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta

chapter 3|25 pages

‘I’d Dream of Feasts’

Reading Southworth’s The Hidden Hand as a Dual Outlaw Narrative

chapter 4|20 pages

Breaking Bad While Baking Bread

The Cereal Politics of Belle Starr’s Outlaw Reputation

chapter 5|22 pages

The Twentieth-Century American Outlaw Feast

Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

chapter 6|25 pages

Food Fight!

Excess and Deficiency in National Lampoon’s Animal House

chapter 7|19 pages

Post-Apocalyptic Outlaws

Weaponizing Food and Community in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games

chapter 8|21 pages

Succulent Texts

Desire, Outlaws, and Consumption in Popular Romance