This edited collection considers representations of ancient Egypt in the literature of the nineteenth-century. It addresses themes such as reanimated mummies, ancient Egyptian mythology and contemporary consumer culture across literary modes ranging from burlesque satire to historical novels, stage performances to Gothic fiction and popular culture to the highbrow. The book illuminates unknown sources of historical significance – including the first illustration of an ambulatory mummy – revising current understandings of the works of canonical writers and grounding its analysis firmly in a contemporary context. The contributors demonstrate the extensive range of cultural interest in ancient Egypt that flourished during Victoria’s reign. At the same time, they use ancient Egypt to interrogate ‘selfhood’ and ‘otherness’, notions of race, imperialism, religion, gender and sexuality.
Table of Content
Introduction – Eleanor Dobson
1 Allamistakeo awakes: the earliest image of an ambulatory mummy – Jasmine Day
2 Adam Bede: an ancient Egyptian book of Genesis – Haythem Bastawy
3 Remembering Mrs Potiphar: Victorian reclamations of a biblical temptress – Angie Blumberg
4 Prefiguring the cross: a typological reading of H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra – Sara Woodward
5 ‘The culminating flower of cat-worship in Egypt’: nineteenth-century stage Cleopatras and Victorian views of ancient Egypt – Molly Youngkin
6 ‘A Memnon waiting for the day’: ancient Egypt in aestheticism and decadence – Giles Whiteley
7 Perfume, cigarettes and gilded boards: Pharos the Egyptian and consumer culture – Eleanor Dobson
8 The intelligibility of the past in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars – Luz Elena Ramirez
Index
About the author
Eleanor Dobson is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham
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