Search results
defiance, the work of the unnamed illustrator of the Vizetelly edition – likely its publisher Henry Vizetelly himself 8 – occupies an important place in the history of modern visual and literary depictions of Egyptian mummies and the sociopolitical discourses that they voiced. The Vizetelly illustration also embellishes Poe's vision, invoking contemporary racial theories about the ethnic identities of ancient Egyptians. An artist must necessarily reference the tone of a subject's skin, where a writer might leave such
subvert art itself. Fuelled by the prevalence of Egyptian mummies discovered, traded and ultimately commodified throughout the nineteenth century, the spectre of Mrs Potiphar's undiscovered corpse haunts discussions of aesthetic media. Ground mummy was used throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a pigment (often called ‘Mummy Brown’) for both oil paint and glazes, and was in use by artists including Edward Burne-Jones and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Its colour, though variable, was a light brown with sometimes a grey tinge. 69
‘Some Words with a Mummy’ (1845) which was published posthumously alongside this tale in an anthology of his works in 1852. This illustration is the earliest known visual depiction of a revived Egyptian mummy, a character that later became an archetypal figure in Victorian literature. Day situates the unknown artist's vision of the fictional mummy Allamistakeo within the history of visual and literary depictions of mummies and the sociopolitical discourses they articulated, comparing the illustrator's engagement in contemporary debates with those suggested by Poe
features Baudelaire lying down, wrapped in linen like an Egyptian mummy, while a statue of a Thinker stands above, meditating on his remains. 47 In this sense, the Egyptian imagery on his cenotaph compares with that of Wilde's own tomb, located in Cimetière du Père Lachaise, cut by Jacob Epstein, and which features a prominent sphinx. But in Mallarmé's reading of Baudelaire, if the Egyptian is allied with death, this is not simply a question of lifelessness: far from figuring as a petrified ‘granite’ or ‘lifeless
an alternative world of forbidden knowledge that seemingly centres on the type of pre-Christian pleasures that we have witnessed elsewhere in Machen. This is a decadent world in which amorality leads to death and Walters plays a key role in leading Mr Headley, the owner of the coin, to Dr Lipsius, who murders him and then disguises the body as an Egyptian mummy that he intends to sell to the British
to Egypt is taken in the narrative’s past, the leading explorer being Mr Trelawny who brought back various objects including an Egyptian mummy, that of Queen Tera. Mr Trelawny and his circle, including his daughter, Margaret, and Margaret’s devoted admirer, our narrator Malcolm Ross, later make the journey from London to Cornwall as this is a relatively isolated place where the ‘Great Experiment
and portrayed aspects of its society and culture, ancient and modern, as the locus of grave threat. It includes texts by major popular authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and H. Rider Haggard and by less well-known contemporaries such as H. D. Everett and Guy Boothby, not to mention scores of ephemeral periodical tales by entirely forgotten authors. The key image to emerge was that of the vengeful Egyptian mummy which, like Stoker’s Dracula and Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, has persisted into modern popular culture. Though the current treatment of the
matter; whether French or Cornish the ghostly inhabitants figure as foreign to the English tourist, contributing to the sense of Cornwall as different from the England of which it is at the same time a part. The difference between the Cornish and the foreign seems collapsible, as in the case of Leon’s African savagery, or Trelawney’s daughter’s exchangeability with the Egyptian mummy. In many stories of
’s description of Cesare: ‘He was the most awful-looking man – it was horrible – all grey and strange – and his clothes looked like – almost a mummy’s wrappings.’ This description paints a slightly different picture from the iconic image of Conrad Veidt in the 1920 film. By likening the character to an Egyptian mummy, the BBC version creates an image more like Boris Karloff in the Universal Picture The Mummy