Eleanor Dobson | University of Birmingham (original) (raw)

Books by Eleanor Dobson

UCL Press, 2022

Victorian Alchemy explores nineteenth-century conceptions of ancient Egypt as this extant civilis... more Victorian Alchemy explores nineteenth-century conceptions of ancient Egypt as this extant civilisation was being ‘rediscovered’ in the modern world. With its material remnants somewhat paradoxically symbolic of both antiquity and modernity (in the very currentness of Egyptological excavations), ancient Egypt was at once evocative of ancient magical power and of cutting-edge science, a tension that might be productively conceived of as ‘alchemical’. Allusions to ancient Egypt simultaneously lent an air of legitimacy to depictions of the supernatural while projecting a sense of enchantment onto representations of cutting-edge science.

Examining literature and other cultural forms including art, photography and early film, Eleanor Dobson traces the myriad ways in which magic and science were perceived as entwined, and ancient Egypt evoked in parallel with various fields of study, from imaging technologies and astronomy, to investigations into the electromagnetic spectrum and the human mind itself. In so doing, counter to linear narratives of nineteenth-century progress, and demonstrating how ancient Egypt was more than a mere setting for Orientalist fantasies or nightmares, the book establishes how conceptions of modernity were inextricably bound up in the contemporary reception of the ancient world, and suggests how such ideas that took root and flourished in the Victorian era persist to this day.

Edinburgh University Press, 2020

This book explores literary and Egyptological cultures from the closing decades of the nineteenth... more 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.

Manchester University Press , 2020

This edited collection considers representations of ancient Egypt in the literature of the ninete... more 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.

Bloomsbury, 2020

Ancient Egypt has always been a source of fascination to writers, artists and architects in the W... more Ancient Egypt has always been a source of fascination to writers, artists and architects in the West. This book is the first study to address representations of Ancient Egypt in the modern imagination, breaking down conventional disciplinary boundaries between fields such as History, Classics, Art History, Fashion, Film, Archaeology, Egyptology, and Literature to further a nuanced understanding of ancient Egypt in cultures stretching from the eighteenth century to the present day, emphasising how some of the various meanings of ancient Egypt to modern people have traversed time and media.

Divided into three themes, the chapters scrutinise different aspects of the use of ancient Egypt in a variety of media, looking in particular at the ways in which Egyptology as a discipline has influenced representations of Egypt, ancient Egypt's associations with death and mysticism, as well as connections between ancient Egypt and gendered power. The diversity of this study aims to emphasise both the multiplicity and the patterning of popular responses to ancient Egypt, as well as the longevity of this phenomenon and its relevance today.

Routledge, 2018

This book scrutinizes physical, temporal and psychological strata across early twentieth-century ... more This book scrutinizes physical, temporal and psychological strata across early twentieth-century literature, focusing on geological and archaeological tropes and conceptions of the stratified psyche. The essays explore psychological perceptions, from practices of envisioning that mimic looking at a painting, photograph or projected light, to the comprehension of the palimpsestic complexities of language, memory and time. This collection is the first to see early twentieth-century physical, temporal and psychological strata interact across a range of canonical and popular authors, working in a variety of genres, from theatre to ghost stories, children’s literature to modernist magna opera.

British Library , 2017

Of the monsters that stalked the pages of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction, the we... more Of the monsters that stalked the pages of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction, the werewolf has continued to represent the beast lurking underneath the veneer of human civilisation to this day, a composite creature which is all too easily released and, once at large, difficult to constrain. From one of the very first werewolf stories appearing in Britain to a tale published after the First World War, this collection brings together the greatest werewolf fiction from a period stretching to nearly a century. The anthology showcases the work of some of the best-known names in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction alongside the twisted tales of their lesser-known but equally chilling contemporaries.

Papers by Eleanor Dobson

Alternative Egyptology Critical essays on the relation between academic and alternative interpretations of ancient Egypt, 2024

Modernism/modernity, 2022

How Pharaohs Became Media Stars: Ancient Egypt and Popular Culture, 2023

English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 2020

Among others, Hester Travers Smith (1923) and Leslie Flint (1962) claimed to have communicated wi... more Among others, Hester Travers Smith (1923) and Leslie Flint (1962) claimed to have communicated with the spirit of Oscar Wilde. These and lesser-known instances cannot be entirely explained as the inevitable result of Wilde's continuing notoriety nor even as the mediums' desire to produce a few witty epigrams to sway the incredulous. Wilde's interest in the otherworldly is expressed most explicitly in terms of his literary output in The Picture of Dorian Gray, though the ties between it and spiritualism have gone unexplored. This article fills this lacuna by establishing Wilde's position within the fin-de-siècle magical revival, investigating Wilde's engagement with phenomena associated with spiritualism and the supernatural, paying particular attention to his encounters with the photographic medium, the connections between his experiences of photographic and painted portraits and occult activities in order to illuminate spiritually inflected traces in his writings.

Aegyptiaca, 2018

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Egyptian-themed narratives depicted all kind... more In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Egyptian-themed narratives depicted all kinds of behaviour deemed transgressive by contemporary standards. As Bradley Deane observes, for instance, mummy fictions "dissolve many of the oppositions that typically structure British identity: science/magic, Christianity/paganism, rationality/superstition, modernity/antiquity, colonizer/ colonized, and, at times, masculinity/femininity". 1 Interrogating this latter binary, recent scholarship has further sought to scrutinise the range of sexual complexities present in depictions of ancient Egypt in the modern world, especially those that verge away from the heteronormative; "many constructions of Egypt", as Lynn Meskell rightly states, "have been queered". 2 Angie Blumberg has, for instance, demonstrated the existence of queer archaeological motifs in literature of the late nineteenth century, focusing specifically on the works of Oscar Wilde and Vernon Lee, a corpus that might be read as a forerunner to the emergence of "queer archaeology" in the 1980s. 3 Blumberg pays particular attention to Wilde's poem "The Sphinx" (1894), demonstrating how Egyptian mythology and imagery are alluded to in order to catalogue "illicit activit[ies] and desire[s]" that drive "all manner of unconventional relationships", which include same-sex couplings as well as problematic bestial and necrophilic encounters. 4 This essay complements Blumberg's analysis by focusing upon a single facet of queer archaeologies as defined by her, Meskell and others. Cross-dressing has a range of connotations, from the playful and comedic, to the sexual and the symbolic. It can be deeply personal, performative, public or private. Through unpicking some of the connotations of cross-dressing across the examples in Wearing the sword of her male lover while he slumbers in her own female attire, Cleopatra adopts a symbolic phallus, the precursor to the asp with which she 5

Excavating Modernity: Physical, Temporal and Psychological Stratification in Literature, 1900-1930, 2018

Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2018

This special issue brings together the work of scholars from several disciplines (history, art hi... more This special issue brings together the work of scholars from several disciplines (history, art history, archaeology, Egyptology, and literary criticism) in order to address a number of hitherto unexplored aspects of ancient Egypt’s place in nineteenth-century culture. The essays in this special issue consider the ways in which ancient Egyptian civilisation was used as a means of confronting contemporary ideas of history, empire, politics, science, mysticism, religion and psychology, as well as the intersection between Egyptology (as an emerging academic discipline) and Egyptomania (the manifestation of enthusiasm for Egypt—in particular, the country’s ancient past—in the cultural consciousness more broadly). Traversing class and gender boundaries, extending from material to literary culture, and investigating representations of Egypt in a variety of artistic and literary modes, the essays which make up this special issue combine to produce the first truly multidisciplinary study of ancient Egypt’s reception in the nineteenth century, demonstrating the lasting significance of Egypt’s influence across nineteenth-century culture and its appropriation for a variety of agendas.

In the early twentieth century both fictional and (purportedly) factual narratives abounded that ... more In the early twentieth century both fictional and (purportedly) factual narratives abounded that professed an Egyptian presence in the séance room, from mummy bandages that materialized in the dark to apparitions of ancient Egyptians that sought to make contact with the living. This chapter argues that links between the modern world and that of antiquity in these contexts were used to affirm the belief that the modern “West” was the natural inheritor of the mysticism and wisdom of the “East.” In accordance with contemporary psychology’s emphasis upon accessing repressed or buried secrets, the re-emergence of ancient Egypt in these spiritualist scenarios stands for generalized—and shared—psychological esoterica. At a time when psychological practitioners including Sigmund Freud were envisioning the mind as a stratified organ reminiscent of the archaeological site, ancient Egypt comes to symbolize the darkest depths of the psyche.

In Excavating Modernity: Physical, Temporal and Psychological Stratification in Literature, 1900-1930, ed. by Eleanor Dobson and Gemma Banks (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 83-102

This essay proposes that a number of the concerns expressed in Dracula can be read through Bram S... more This essay proposes that a number of the concerns expressed in Dracula can be read through Bram Stoker's employment of the imagery of precious metals and jewels. Focusing on the materiality of place – the treasure-laced landscape of Transylvania and the cliffs of Whitby famous for their reserves of jet – and the association between these materials and vampirism, I argue that analysing the symbolism of precious materials leads to a fuller understanding of many of the novel's key anxieties. Not only does this analysis demonstrate Stoker's elaborate use of jewel imagery in developing the notion of the female vampire as a hard, penetrative woman, it identifies the imperial implications of the trade in precious materials. In doing so, it claims that Stoker employs a 'language of jewels' in Dracula , through which he critiques the imperialistic plundering of Eastern lands, and demonstrates how these monsters – intimately entwined with these materials – attempt a rejection of Western appropriation.

While the notion that ancient Egyptian iconography and artefacts might be held as nightmarish has... more While the notion that ancient Egyptian iconography and artefacts might be held as nightmarish has a literary history stretching back to the early nineteenth century, it was in the final decades of the Victorian era that ancient Egyptian artefacts—specifically the bodies of the mummified dead—began to be held as objects which might trigger psychological breakdown. With the development of the scientific field of psychology, these monstrous bodies began to assert their power through an affront on gender and sexual norms, in particular, “unmanning” male characters in mummy fiction by stimulating hysterical responses. As a psychiatric diagnosis applied primarily to women in the nineteenth century (and often connected to the womb), hysteria appears to be a fitting psychological state for those threatened by a monster whose very name—‘mummy’—evokes the notion of a supernatural and eternal feminine.
Focusing on Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” (1892), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), “The Story of Baelbrow” (1898) by Katherine and Hesketh Prichard (1989) and Guy Boothby’s Pharos the Egyptian (1899), this essay identifies the intersection between mummy fiction and contemporary psychological theory, reading the experiences of the characters faced with traumatising bodies in light of theories of degeneration as popularised by Max Nordau, and contemporary psychological works by Havelock Ellis.
The degenerate bodies of ancient Egypt are mirrored in the degenerate psyches evident in modern characters across a type of fiction which, unlike other fin-de-siècle monsters, such as vampires, has only in recent decades attracted sustained critical attention. Reading depictions of ancient Egyptian mummies (or other supernatural bodies) as sexually “other”—ranging from asexual and corpse-like to hermaphroditic and alluring—as provocative of troubling psychological states, this essay reveals how the figure of the mummy came to be emblematic of fin-de-siècle “gender trouble,” projecting its sexual indistinctness onto modern minds.

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities , 2018

Beauty has many contradictory associations, from ephemerality to permanence, the natural to the a... more Beauty has many contradictory associations, from ephemerality to permanence, the natural to the artificial. When we attempt to locate the beautiful, notions of ‘conventional’ beauty often conflict with individual assessments of what is beautiful. We are told that beauty is in the eye of the beholder(s), but is beauty only ever a perception, or can it be an intrinsic quality of objects and people? Is it possible to define the nature of the aesthetic experience? Beauty may trigger philosophical or spiritual contemplation, but it can also evoke possessiveness and lust. Historically, beauty has been admired as virtuous and feared as dangerous. Do judgements about beauty do a disservice to their object, or do they elevate it?

Anglo-American Travelers and the Hotel Experience in Nineteenth-Century Literature

This chapter identifies a trend that saw Egyptian hotels constructed as places of Gothic fantasy ... more This chapter identifies a trend that saw Egyptian hotels constructed as places of Gothic fantasy in literature of the late nineteenth century. Drawing upon the works of Victorian writers such as Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, Guy Boothby, and Sabine Baring-Gould, the essay proposes that the luxury hotel with its theatrical decor offered an immersive dream-like experience, and thus provided a suitable setting for plots involving ghostly visions, hypnotic influence, and hallucination. Egypt, in particular, was home to a host of such venues. As a fashionable Winter destination for British and American travellers alike, and with its hotels boasting all of the same modern comforts as their counterparts on the continent, Egyptian hotels were particularly susceptible to becoming sites where characters with a taste for opulence and who move in the most glittering social circles come face to face with the occult.
Corelli’s Ziska (1897), Boothby’s ‘A Professor of Egyptology’ (1878), Grant Allen’s My New Year’s Eve Among the Mummies’, and Baring-Gould’s ‘Mustapha’ (1894) are analysed within the historical and cultural context of Egypt’s real hotels. In such places, where the décor was often based on ancient Egyptian temples or tombs, stepping over the threshold was akin to stepping back in time. Frequently, hotel entertainment included the unwrapping of mummies which had been installed in genuine tombs earlier that day for the guests to ‘discover’. The blurring of the invented and the real actually encountered in these spaces is, I argue, key to an understanding of the fiction that they inspired. As places where the rich and famous congregated, Cairo’s luxury hotels became places of aspirational reverie, where one could rub shoulders with royalty, presidents, prime ministers, celebrities and eccentric Egyptologists. Shepheard’s Hotel and the Mena House, in particular, were some of the most famous hotels in the world in their time. As such, they were of crucial cultural significance when considering not only Victorian narratives of extravagant fantasy, but also the hotel in the broader context of nineteenth-century fiction.

This essay examines the relationship between mummy fiction and the fairy-tale genre in the closin... more This essay examines the relationship between mummy fiction and the fairy-tale genre in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. It argues that dormant and perfectly-preserved female mummies that populate much of fin-de-siècle mummy fiction emulate the figure of Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, preserved in glass coffins or museum display cases. Concurrently, it observes that while the suggestion of the marriage of the mummy is raised in a number of these texts, any chance of longstanding romantic union is often foiled, in contrast to the distinctly marital “happily-ever-after”s characteristic of the fairy tale. As human remains that were bought, sold and collected throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and beyond, mummies invited (and still invite) objectification. Yet the frequent disintegration or disappearance of these desirable mummies before they can be bound by the legal and religious strictures of marriage in these fictions demarcates them as objects which cannot be tamed. This essay claims that we might read this in light of Britain’s contemporary imperial involvement in Egypt, a political and historical context that scholars have recognised as responsible for a number of narratives revolving around the notion of the mummy’s curse: the female bodies which cannot be fully controlled could be seen to resist Britain’s imperialist mission. Ultimately, through this analysis, this essay seeks to reconcile the “imperial Gothic” whose tales of imperial adventure and danger are often held to be “masculine,” with the fairy tale, held by many theorists as “feminine.” This approach aims to establish the influence of fairy-tale tropes and conventions far beyond the genres traditionally aligned with this “feminine” tradition.

UCL Press, 2022

Edinburgh University Press, 2020

Manchester University Press , 2020

Bloomsbury, 2020

Routledge, 2018

British Library , 2017

Alternative Egyptology Critical essays on the relation between academic and alternative interpretations of ancient Egypt, 2024

Modernism/modernity, 2022

How Pharaohs Became Media Stars: Ancient Egypt and Popular Culture, 2023

English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, 2020

Aegyptiaca, 2018

Excavating Modernity: Physical, Temporal and Psychological Stratification in Literature, 1900-1930, 2018

Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2018

In Excavating Modernity: Physical, Temporal and Psychological Stratification in Literature, 1900-1930, ed. by Eleanor Dobson and Gemma Banks (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 83-102

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities , 2018

Anglo-American Travelers and the Hotel Experience in Nineteenth-Century Literature

In 1892 the celebrated physicist and chemist William Crookes commented on the existence of “an al... more In 1892 the celebrated physicist and chemist William Crookes commented on the existence of “an almost infinite range of ethereal vibrations or electrical rays,” which he believed could revolutionize telegraphic communications (174). A few years later, and aided by Crookes's experiments with vacuums, the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen successfully produced X-rays, a hitherto unrecorded form of electromagnetic radiation, which he tantalizingly described as “a new kind of invisible light” (Röntgen 413; Warner 256). Crookes was quick to speculate as to “the possibility of links between roentgen rays and the cerebral ganglia,” that an undiscovered organ in the brain might be “capable of transmitting and receiving . . . electrical rays” (Lyons 105; Crookes 176). X-rays, he thought, might prove a psychic counterpart to higher wavelength radio waves, allowing the transmission of messages telepathically rather than telegraphically, and even communication with the world of the spirits (Lyons 105). Crookes theorized that the parapsychological was intimately entwined with the findings of contemporary physics, occupying different zones of the same electromagnetic spectrum. An ardent Spiritualist, he believed that the ether, the “impalpable, invisible entity, by which all space is supposed to be filled” and which contained countless “channels of communication” also sustained “ghost-light . . . invisible to the naked eye” and acted as a medium that allowed “ethereal bodies to rise up” (Crookes 174; Warner 253–56). In other words, the matter through which light and electrical signals passed was envisaged as the same substance which allowed the spirits to fluctuate between visible and invisible forms. These links between the electromagnetic field and the occult, endorsed by Crookes and certain other members of his circles such as the Society for Psychical Research, anticipated turn-of-the-century associations between electricity, radiation and ancient Egypt which, through its reputation as the birthplace of magic, was central to Victorian conceptions of the supernatural.

A century after the death of Oscar Wilde, literature, films, cartoons and comic books provide fic... more A century after the death of Oscar Wilde, literature, films, cartoons and comic books provide fictional spaces in which his ghost can rematerialize. This essay examines a number of these representations of Wilde in phantasmal form, analyzing the ways in which they conform to the figure of Wilde as he endures in the cultural consciousness: as the epitome of visual dandyism and the paragon of aphoristic wit. While the ghost of Wilde imitates these most celebrated qualities, confirming the perpetual recycling of the Wildean stereotype, his impact upon the contemporary worlds in which he is reimagined reveals his persisting influence upon and relevance to modern culture. Across media, his power is shown to have a magical potency, which, fairytale-esque, contributes to harmonious conclusions for those he encounters.