Cannibal Fictions

"Cannibal Fictions brings together two discrete periods in U.S. history: the years between the Civil War and WWI, a high-water mark in America's imperial presence; and the post-Vietnam era, when the nation was beginning to seriously question its own global agenda. Berglund shows how P.T. Barnum, in a traveling exhibit featuring so-called "Fiji cannibals," served up an alien "other" for popular consumption, while Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Tarzan of the Apes series tapped into similar anxieties about the eruption of foreign elements into a homogeneous culture."--Jacket.