Consuming Narratives is a collection of essays dealing with the relevance of the concept and metaphor of appetite for understanding writing, politics, race, nation and gender in the medieval and modern periods. The essays trace the development of concepts of monstrous consumption through three key areas: the role of appetite in the construction of the self and its others; the use of the metaphor of appetite to represent sexual and epistemological activities; and the socio-political dimension of appetite.