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Chapter 14 - Vampires, Alterity, and Strange Eating

from Part III - Applications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2018

Gitanjali G. Shahani
Affiliation:
San Francisco State University
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Summary

Although the Victorianist vampire tends to serve as our reference point for vampiric feeding, this essay provides another angle in our understanding of blood drinking in the context of food and literature. I examine blood drinking as a form of strange eating, to argue that vampiric feeding, or the impulse to drink blood, manifests from the intersection of medicine, myth, and ideas of human difference to produce a diet that pushes on the boundaries of what constitutes humanity in the literary imagination. This essay highlights the more obscure—and thus more urgent—alternative or marginalized histories and afterlives of vampiric feeding, before and beyond the Victorian vampire: blood lust as infant nourishment, medicinal ingestion, or eating disorder with racial ramifications, from ancient epileptic blood-drinking and early modern menstrual blood to the cross-pollination of blood drinking, disordered eating, and community building in the twenty-first century. 
Type
Chapter
Information
Food and Literature , pp. 270 - 286
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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