Introduction

Romola Nuttall’s, Roberta Marangi’s and Nora Castle’s chapters consider past, present and future instances of anthropophagy, metaphorical and literal, around the (dinner) table. Bloody banquets are one of the most ancient forms of cannibalism in the western canon, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the Scandinavian Poetic Edda and early modern drama to contemporary speculative fiction. The bloody banquet not only brings together violent practices – ascribed to different groups that occidental discourse has othered – with the occidental space of ritualised practices and commensality, but it also merges familiarity and horror, emphasising the brutality that can be found at home, the space that one considers ‘homely’ and ‘civilised’. In an equally shocking moment near the end of The Bloody Banquet, the pieces of a quartered human being, freshly slaughtered, are hung on hooks in front of the audience.