Victorian Literary Culture and Ancient Egypt

This is the first academic study to address ancient Egypt as it was appropriated across disparate literary modes during the Victorian era. Drawing on texts by canonical authors while illuminating new sources and understudied works, it brings the highbrow and the popular into conversation, addressing contemporary ideas of race, gender and religion. -- .

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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. -- .