Eating/cannibalism as a metaphor for interarts relationships, Thyestes, Carroll's Alice stories, and The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover

Abstract

My purpose in this thesis is deliberately to trouble interarts scholarship by examining what has tended to be relatively subliminal: namely the cannibalistic nature of image/text relationships. Specifically, this thesis will explore how the theme of cannibalism/eating inserts itself into interarts theory and practice and how it functions as a metaphor for relationships between the arts. While the depiction of food and drink has long been and remains a "collective obsession" for artists, and while this century has seen a significant number of studies concerned with the way food is depicted in a single medium (i.e., paintings of food, or poems about food), my study differs from those of the past in several ways: (1) my concern is less with food per se and more with eating and in turn with the way that the eater/eaten relationship is analogous to the way that the various arts are ranked; (2) the texts I will be examining have a multimedia character, and my focus is on how both the verbal and the visual media are enlisted to deal with the eating issue; and (3) I place both interarts collaboration and interarts rivalry in the context of the eater/eaten relationship. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)