SOURCE: Kilgour, Maggie. “Cannibals and Critics: An Exploration of James de Mille's Strange Manuscript.” Mosaic 30, no. 1 (March 1997): 19-37.

In the following essay, Kilgour asserts that De Mille utilized the figure of the cannibal in A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder as an instrument for commenting on mid-nineteenth-century imperialism and materialism.

In 1972, René Girard noted that although incest and cannibalism are equally important to the foundational myths of the West, “we are perhaps more distracted” by the former than the latter. He speculated, however, that incest may have claimed greater attention “only because cannibalism has not yet found its Freud and been promoted to the status of a major contemporary myth” (276-77). While Girard's observation may have been true in 1972, it seems less so in 1997, when we are in the midst of a veritable boom of cannibal literature, films, and criticism. Since the 1960s the cannibal has...