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Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture

Writing the SphinxLiterature, Culture and Egyptology

By Eleanor Dobson

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£100.00

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About this book

Unearths a rich tradition of creative flexibility, collaboration and mutual influence between literary culture and Egyptology
  • The first monograph study to bring literature into conversation with Egyptological culture
  • Incorporates a number of archival primary sources which have, until now, escaped critical attention
  • Analyses canonical literature alongside works by lesser-known authors
  • Combines literary criticism with book history, the history of science, and reception studies

This book explores literary and Egyptological cultures from the closing decades of the nineteenth century to the opening decades of the twentieth, culminating in the aftermath of the high-profile discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. Analysing the works of Egyptologists including Howard Carter, Arthur Weigall and E. A. Wallis Budge alongside those of their literary contemporaries such as H. Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli and Oscar Wilde, it investigates the textual, cultural and material exchanges between literature, Egyptology and visual and material culture across this period.

Reviews

This magnificent book investigates the startlingly complex ways in which literature, art and Egyptology have influenced each other. With an impressive range of textual and material forms, Dobson provides a vivid, authoritative and revelatory analysis of cultural engagements with the idea of ancient Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Once read, Egyptology will never seem the same again.
Table of contents

Introduction

1. ‘Wonderful Things’: Howard Carter, Literary Genre & Material Intertextuality2. ‘Fairy Tales’ and ‘Bunkum’: Marie Corelli, Artefacts & Fabrications3. ‘The Master-Key that Opens Every Door’: Hieroglyphs, Translations & Palimpsests4. ‘Drunk on the Dead’: Intoxication, Perfume & Mummy Dust5. ‘The Sphinx Will Speak at Last’: Visions, Communications & Spiritual Experience

Coda Appendix 1: ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’Index

About the author

Eleanor Dobson

Eleanor Dobson is Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Victorian Alchemy: Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt (2022) and Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology (2020), the second chapter of which focuses on Corelli. Eleanor worked with Joanna Turner co-editing and co-writing for a special issue of Victoriographies on Corelli in 2025.

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