Victorian literary culture and ancient Egypt

Eleanor Dobson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781526141880
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526141903
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: Literature

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 contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Allamistakeo awakes: the earliest image of an ambulatory mummy
• 2 Adam Bede: an ancient Egyptian Book of Genesis
• 3 Remembering Mrs Potiphar: Victorian reclamations of a biblical temptress
• 4 Prefiguring the cross: a typological reading of H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra
• 5 ‘The culminating flower of cat-worship in Egypt’: nineteenth-century stage Cleopatras and Victorian views of ancient Egypt
• 6 ‘A Memnon waiting for the day’: ancient Egypt in the aesthetic and decadent imaginary
• 7 Perfume, cigarettes and gilded boards: Pharos the Egyptian and consumer culture
• 8 The intelligibility of the past in Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars
• Select bibliography
• Index