British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840-1910

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxvii

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2. Bound by an English Eye: Ancient Cultures, Imperialist Contexts, and Literary Representations of Ancient Egyptian Women

   • Molly Youngkin

   Pages 1-33

3. Acting as “the right hand … of God”: Christianized Egyptian Women and Religious Devotion as Emancipation in Florence Nightingale’s Fictionalized Treatises

   • Molly Youngkin

   Pages 35-61

4. “[T]o give new elements … as vivid as … long familiar types”: Heroic Jewish Men, Dangerous Egyptian Women, and Equivocal Emancipation in George Eliot’s Novels

   • Molly Youngkin

   Pages 63-97

5. “[W]e had never chosen a Byzantine subject … or one from Alexandria”: Emancipation Through Desire and the Eastern Limits of Beauty in Michael Field’s Verse Dramas

   • Molly Youngkin

   Pages 99-130

6. The “sweetness of the serpent of old Nile”: Revisionist Cleopatra and Spiritual Union as Emancipation in Elinor Glyn’s Cross-Cultural Romances

   • Molly Youngkin

   Pages 131-153

7. “My ancestor, my sister”: Ancient Heritage Imagery and Modern Egyptian Women Writers

   • Molly Youngkin

   Pages 155-181

8. Afterword

   • Molly Youngkin

   Pages 183-184

9. Back Matter

   Pages 185-229

   PDF

Focusing on British women writers' knowledge of ancient Egypt, Youngkin shows the oftentimes limited but pervasive representations of ancient Egyptian women in their written and visual works. Images of Hathor, Isis, and Cleopatra influenced how British writers such as George Eliot and Edith Cooper came to represent female emancipation.

• Britain
• fiction
• gender
• George Eliot
• history of literature
• literature
• nineteenth century
• novel
• social science
• sociology
• women
• British and Irish Literature

“British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt offers a new perspective on a set of authors and texts which will help to open up the study of Victorian receptions of ancient Egypt, as well as being of interest to scholars and students of nineteenth-century literature, postcolonialisms, and gender studies.” (Laura Eastlake, English Literature in Transition, Vol. 60 (4), 2017) 

"Molly Youngkin draws on a remarkably varied range of Victorian and Edwardian woman writers to demonstrate how Egypt—both as ancient empire or modern imperial holding—was never distant from their notions of feminist liberation. Through careful attention to literary detail and allusion, this innovative book explores the previously unexamined connections between the imaginings of colonial British writers and the political possibilities explored by postcolonial Egyptian novelists and poets still writing today." - Neil Hultgren, Associate Professor of English, California State University, Long Beach, USA, and author of Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes 

"This book offers a timely and important contribution to a growing body of work analyzing the contact between British women writers and so-called 'antique' cultures. Her work is successful in undertaking a complex framework that brings together discussions of imperialism

and women's writing within the specific context of Egypt. This monograph offers essential reading for scholars interested in Victorian culture and antiquity, as well as those working on the history of women's writing." - Churnjeet Mahn, Chancellor's Fellow, University of Strathclyde, UK and author of British Women's Travel to Greece, 1840-1914: Travels in the Palimpsest

Molly Youngkin is Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, USA. Her previous publications include Feminist Realism at the Fin de Siècle: The Influence of the Late-Victorian Woman's Press on the Development of the Novel (2007) and an annotated edition of Sarah Grand's 1888 novel Ideala (2008).

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