British literature and archaeology, 1880-1930 reveals how British writers and artists across the long turn of the twentieth century engaged with archaeological discourse—its artefacts, landscapes, bodies, and methods—uncovering the materials of the past to envision radical possibilities for the present and future. This project traces how archaeology shaped major late-Victorian and modern discussions: informing debates over shifting gender roles; facilitating the development of queer iconography and the recovery of silenced or neglected histories; inspiring artefactual forgery and transforming modern conceptions of authenticity; and helping writers and artists historicise the traumas of the First World War. Ultimately unearthing archaeology at the centre of these major discourses, this book simultaneously positions literary and artistic engagements with the archaeological imagination as forms of archaeological knowledge in themselves.

Decadence and Orientalism in England and Germany, 1880-1920 examines the Orientalist portrayal of Middle Eastern cultures in Decadent Literatures in England and Germany at the turn of the century. This book argues that the role of Orientalism in literary Decadence uniquely exposes its paradoxical engagement with other cultures. In bringing together two fin-de-siècle European literatures, this comparative study makes a case for the transnational, if not imperial, nature of Decadence. The East emerges as an 'indispensable' mediator between various versions of European Decadence. The book examines the role of the East with specific reference to selected English and German authors: starting from Oscar Wilde's Victorian vision of Egypt and Arthur Symons's and Violet Fane's image of Constantinople, it moves to Paul Scheerbart's and Else Lasker-Schüler's Decadent Babylon and Assyria and concludes by turning to Stefan George's exclusion of the East from his poetic practice. The geographical reach of the East focuses on regions of the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Africa. The cultural translation of specifically the Middle East into different European national contexts gains new—sometimes oppositional—meanings, avoiding a one-sided representation of both the East and the two national literatures that absorbed it. In arguing for a Decadent cosmopolitanism as a model of heterogeneous inclusivity that reaches beyond the binaries established by Edward Said's Orientalism, the present book brings twenty-first century theories of cosmopolitanism into dialogue with art history and literature to uncover striking synergies and interdependences between the different manifestations of Decadence in England and Germany.

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.

This book examines late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature written in England and Germany, exploring the relationship between Orientalism, Decadence, and cosmopolitanism, arguing that representations of the East played a critical role in the literary landscape of Decadence over this period.

#MeToo and Modernism offers a blend of cultural, historical, literary, and pedagogical responses applied to the themes behind today’s ongoing #MeToo Movement. This volume is organized into four sections: a three-part chronological response in which scholars analyze literary understandings of how ripples of the #MeToo Movement began to emerge in Modernist literature, followed by a pedagogical section on how to incorporate such teachings in university classrooms. Editors Robin E. Field and Jerrica Jordan foreword the collection with an introduction answering the question of why such a volume is necessary in today’s educational landscape. The introduction summarizes the current scholarship regarding #MeToo and Modernism, while also uncovering the omissions, particularly in approaching nonbinary or queer writers, as well as writers of color, that still exist; as a response, many of these essays attempt to approach these gaps. Furthermore, the introduction shows how more traditional Modernist writers--including Woolf, Forster, Wells, and Joyce--served as forerunners of early glimmers of the #MeToo Movement in Modernist Literature.

With the purpose of introducing Marie Corelli to a new generation of readers and of reconsidering her works for generations familiar with them, Reinventing Marie Corelli for the Twenty-First Century demonstrates how provocative the author was as a public figure and how controversial and paradoxical were the views about womanhood and the supernatural pitched in her novels. This collection of original essays focuses on three major battles that engaged Corelli: her personal and public contentions, her mercurial constructions of gender and resistance to the New Woman modality and her untenable reconciliation of science with the supernatural. Corelli was often fighting several fronts at the same time; she rarely was not at war with someone including herself.