Food and Feast in Modern Outlaw Tales (Outlaws in Literature, History, and Culture)

This collection of scholarly essays presents new work from in 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. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series 3 Title 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 Acknowledgments 8 Introduction 10 1 ‘Bred Up a Butcher’: The Meat Trade and Its Connection with Criminality in Eighteenth­Century England 21 2 The Fare of ‘Sanguinary Devils’: Feast and Storytelling in The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta 37 3 ‘I’d Dream of Feasts’: Reading Southworth’s The Hidden Hand as a Dual Outlaw Narrative 65 4 Breaking Bad While Baking Bread: The Cereal Politics of Belle Starr’s Outlaw Reputation 90 5 The Twentieth­Century American Outlaw Feast: Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool­Aid Acid Test 110 6 Food Fight!: Excess and Deficiency in National Lampoon’s Animal House 132 7 Post­Apocalyptic Outlaws: Weaponizing Food and Community in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games 157 8 Succulent Texts: Desire, Outlaws, and Consumption in Popular Romance 176 List of Contributors 197 Index 200 This book argues that food and feasting moments in modern outlaw tales illuminate that which bonds all humans, and it examines ways in which food and feasting are often used to note difference, create discord, and manipulate power dynamics.