SOURCE: Guth, Gwendolyn. “Reading Frames of Reference: The Satire of Exegesis in James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.” Canadian Literature 145 (summer 1995): 39-59.

In the following excerpt, Guth considers De Mille's use of framing in A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder to satirize the process of exegesis.

Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all...