| This dissertation examines how British writers and artists at the turn of the twentieth century appropriated archaeological discourse to understand their own modernity, and to envision new social, sexual, and aesthetic possibilities. Addressing a range of literature and visual art from the 1880s through the 1920s, this project ultimately restores the centrality of archaeology to major characteristic discourses of the fin de siecle. Chapter One explores how H. Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, and Bram Stoker manipulate a perceived connection between the female mummy and modern female sexuality to explore anxieties about the iconic New Woman, creating a strain of what I call New Woman Mummy Fiction. In Chapter Two, I demonstrate how Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and E.M. Forster see the past as a rich repository of materials for constructing and expressing queer identity, and argue that queerness their works operates as an epistemological frame of mind into which these artists train their readers in what I call a queer archaeological epistemology. Chapter Three examines fin-de-siecle reappraisals of the seventeenth-century polymath Sir Thomas Browne's archaeological tract Urn Burial. Uncovering this primal decadent text and tracing its themes and formal devices as they are repeated throughout the works of Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, E.M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf, this chapter exhibits how the archaeological encounter, and the uniquely sensuous, irregular formal reflections it incites, shapes a decadent aesthetic while pushing writers into the very forms and sensibilities which we recognize as modernist. Chapter Four turns to texts by Mary Butts and life-writing and visual art of Paul Nash to uncover how archaeological discourse informed mediations of the aesthetic, personal, and temporal crises of the First World War. I conclude with a brief coda, considering twentieth and twenty-first century technological developments in archaeology, such as aerial archaeology and remote sensing, alongside recent developments in scholarly reading practices such as distant reading. I query how these revaluations of critical distance may transform representations of the archaeological encounter to reflect the particular conditions of our own modernity. |
