Indigenous Ritual, Girardian Sacrifice, and Sense of Place in The Last of the Mohicans and Hope Leslie

By applying Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat to two examples of nineteenth-century American literature, this paper argues that these literatures graft fictional American Indian ritual sacrifice onto real, recently colonized geographical sites to sacralize European settlers’ relationship to thei...

The International Journal of Literary Humanities

Common Ground Research Networks