SOURCE: Milnes, Stephen. “Colonialist Discourse, Lord Featherstone's Yawn and the Significance of the Denouement in A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.” Canadian Literature 145 (summer 1995): 86-104.

In the following essay, Milnes presents A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder as a parable of the colonial experience, highlighting what he considers the political necessity of Lord Featherstone's yawn that ends the novel and prevents any further disclosure of colonialist strategies and practices.

The notoriously brusque conclusion to James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is, in most instances, critically undervalued, slighted and derided. From the moment of its posthumous publication in 1888 to the more recent interest sparked by the 1969 New Canadian Library edition of the text and its subsequent promotion within the Canadian canon, Strange Manuscript has been considered structurally flawed, which partly explains why De Mille's novel is regarded “as a minor...