Review of Sara Brio’s “The Shocking Truth: Science, Religion, and Ancient Egypt in Early Nineteenth-Century Fiction

摘要

Egypt’s place in the imagination of nineteenth-century Britain has been the subject ofrenewed scholarly attention. David Gange (2013), Martin Willis (2016), and Colin Kidd(2016) have highlighted how archaeology, artefacts, and mythologies were used indebates about religion, science, and metamythology. In each of these works, Egypt ispresented as a storehouse of ancient wisdom that could be known to Victorianinvestigators through empirical study of those artefacts that had survived fromantiquity. Yet, as Sara Brio argues, in the nascent genre of speculative fiction, ancientwisdom could be embodied and given voice, speaking directly to the concerns of theearly nineteenth century. Brio’s article for an Egyptian-themed special volume ofNineteenth Century Contexts uses two pieces of fiction, Jane Louden’s novel Mummy!A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), and Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “SomeWords with a Mummy” (1845), as case studies.