| Sumario: | Barry Unsworth's 1992 historical fiction novel Sacred Hunger explores the eighteenth-century slave trade while meditating upon utopian societies through an imagined community of shipwrecked enslaved people and sailors. Previous postcolonial and intertextual readings have considered connections with Shakespeare's The Tempest , as well as its Restoration adaptation by John Dryden, The Enchanted Island. I argue that additional content from both plays informs the narrative's ethos and characterization. Specifically, Caliban's role is reinvented several times within the novel to subvert divisions of colonizers and colonized into predictable categories, with nature instead overruling nurture for many character attributes. At the same time, Dryden's lessening of human agency in The Tempest reflects his underlying confidence in a divine political order, which Unsworth seizes upon as illustrative of his eighteenth-century characters' conceptions of the world. Even the book's title represents an overlooked allusion to Dryden's landmark Aeneid translation that helps explain Erasmus Kemp's unsentimental actions as a function of this imperial ethos. Finally, the novel performs something akin to an ecocritical reading of these intertexts, finding, especially in Dryden, a pronounced alienation from the natural world and its bounties. The title Sacred Hunger conceals a deeper argument about the link between food and religion, expressed via the recurring trope of the communion ceremony. This discovery sheds new light on scenes of feasting within the novel, while also helping explain the story's framing device and Unsworth's deeper speculations about religion, anthropology, and the attainability of utopian states.
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