Re-presenting the past: Literary excavations of antiquity in nineteenth-century Britain.

Abstract

The rising profession of archaeology in nineteenth-century Britain popularized the study of antiquity, producing a wide range of aesthetic re-presentations of the past. This dissertation focuses on literary responses to four ancient sites that became important <italic>topoi</italic> in Romantic and Victorian writing: Rome, Pompeii, Troy, and Egyptian Thebes. By imagining subjective relationships to material objects, literary excavations of antiquity emphasized affective identification and emotional affinity as methods for reconstructing the ancient world. The introduction argues that many genres of writing contributed to the archaeological imagination by depicting the encounter with ancient relics as scenes of resurrection and necromancy. Implicit within the aesthetic historicism of these texts is an anachronistic reading of the past reanimated by and in the present. The first chapter examines how the Shelleys represented the Roman Colosseum in fragmented narratives as melancholy meditations on the ruins of antiquity. The second chapter examines how writers like Bulwer-Lytton and Hemans imagined Pompeian relics inviting and repulsing sympathetic responses to the city's ancient inhabitants. The third chapter analyzes the desire to locate mythical Troy and resurrect the pleasure of reading Homeric epic, as played out in texts by Browning, Keats, Schliemann, Gladstone, and Arnold. The fourth chapter argues that fictions about Egyptian mummies by Haggard and Stoker represent ambivalence about antiquity's haunting remains and anxiety toward the excessive presence of the past. Reading across genres and the Romantic/Victorian divide, this dissertation demonstrates a continuous fascination with antiquity throughout the long nineteenth-century and emphasizes a comparative approach to the reception of antiquities. Literal and figurative encounters with archaeological sites allowed nineteenth-century writers to imagine history in terms of an intimate relation to the past, experienced as simultaneously living and dead, familiar and strange, near and far, accessible and irretrievable. Using literature to trace archaeology's gradual development from amateur antiquarianism early in the century to professional archaeology at the end of the century, this dissertation concludes that the subjective pathos of excavated material culture was just as significant as the objective logos of increasingly scientific archaeological discourses, producing a desire not only to <italic>know</italic> the past but also to <italic>feel</italic> it.