From man-eaters to spam-eaters: Cannibal tours, lotus-eaters, and the (anti)development of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imaginings of Oceania

Charles Warren Stoddard, nicely described by Roger Austen as a “genteel pagan,” was known in his day as “the Poet of the South Seas.” His South-Sea Idyls (1874) was the most popular work of literary travel about Oceania after Melville’s Typee and Omoo, and many “South Seas” writers credited Stoddard with infusing them with the spirit of the islands.1 For highbrow readers, that spirit was bright and hazy. William Dean Howells, who published Stoddard in Atlantic Monthly, wrote in an “Introductory Letter” to a reprint of the Idyls (1892) of Stoddard’s fiction as “the lightest, sweetest, wildest, freshest things that ever were written about the life of that summer ocean,” lauded their “mustang humor,” and concluded that “no one need ever write of the South Seas again” (in Stoddard 1905a: v-vi).