Writing the Sphinx

Abstract

This book unearths a rich tradition of creative flexibility, collaboration and mutual influence between literary culture and Egyptology from the late nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century, culminating in the aftermath of the high-profile discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. The first book-length study to focus in depth on the symbiotic relationship between literature and Egyptological culture, it analyses the works of Egyptologists including Howard Carter and E. A. Wallis Budge alongside those of their literary contemporaries such as H. Rider Haggard and Marie Corelli. Combining literary criticism with book history and reception studies, it incorporates a number of archival primary sources which have, until now, escaped critical attention, and reads canonical literature alongside works by lesser-known authors, to ascertain the proliferation of twin Egyptological and literary interests. It was across this period, this book shows, that as a result of the public fervour stirred up by its gilded discoveries and the ancient language that its scholars had so recently deciphered, its high-profile practitioners (both expert and amateur) and its wide range of associations in the cultural consciousness (from magic and longevity, to sexual desire and horror), that Egyptology and its cultural offshoots infiltrated the libraries, lives and minds of an extraordinarily eclectic audience.