‘They all looked such good meat’: Cannibal Metaphors in Early Twentieth Century English Fiction

This project examines cannibal metaphors in early twentieth-century English fiction, exploring how one of the most powerfully enduring colonial tropes about the savage Other seeped into the literary imagination of English-language authors and informed much of their imagery. I read cannibalism as a complicated trope: as both a symptom of imperial racism and as an unstable configuration that boomerangs back on the British and works to undermine firm oppositions between coloniser and colonised. This thesis goes further by investigating the figure of metaphor itself, and examining how it might lend itself to undermining received structures of belief or ethical principle. The project is buttressed by postcolonial theory, and my methodology draws on applied linguistic analysis, giving close attention to lexical choice. Chapter One, ‘Cannibalism in Travel Writing’, reads representations of cannibalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, analysing travelogues by David Livingstone, Henry M. Stanley, and Robert Louis Stevenson. While cannibalism in their writing is a process of othering, it is not a unidirectional process and rather rests on the unspoken awareness of the cannibal-in-oneself. Chapter Two, ‘Cannibalism in Imperial Fiction’, looks at fiction by H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad. Cannibalism in these tales makes a textual intervention to consolidate stories of fictional protagonists, thus serving as an imaginative spur to European heroism. Chapter Three, ‘Cannibal Metaphors in D. H. Lawrence’, explores anthropophagic imagery and its socio-political and cultural import in Lawrence’s fiction. Lawrence appropriates this colonial stereotype about the racialised Other and utilises it in calculated cannibal metaphors to subvert the pillars on which English identity rested: traditional sexual roles, Christianity, colonial power, class system, and capitalist industrialised modernity. Chapter Four, ‘Metaphors of Consumption in Virginia Woolf and Mulk Raj Anand’, asks whether the idea of critique from within the Empire, in the form of cannibal metaphors, precludes authors who did not write from the official British subject position, such as women or colonised subjects. In Woolf and Anand, I argue, cannibal metaphors cast a unique light on both oppression and resistance. In sum, the project explores the ‘domestication’ of the cannibal trope, entailing its redeployment from colonial ‘calumny’ to internalised acknowledgment of, or satire on, the ‘savage’ heart of civilisation. This thesis reads English fiction in the early twentieth century through the narrative and structural lens of cannibalism; I theorise cannibalism as a rich interpretive device and a functional metaphor.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Ali, Sarah

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Gopal, Priyamvada

• Cannibalism
• Colonial tropes
• D. H. Lawrence
• Metaphor
• Modernist fiction

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/80e9d44b-74fc-4dee-b807-034f5a9d9304/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.118478

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/384494