Always Some New Frontier: Tourism and the Gothic Imagination in Late-Victorian Egyptian-Themed Fiction

Abstract

This thesis takes late-Victorian authors of Gothic and Egyptian- themed fiction and studies their imaginative engagement with Egypt as both real-world travellers who wrote about their experiences, or others who wrote about Egypt having never been there (armchair travellers). Grounded in critical perspectives taken from tourism and leisure scholarship, literary, and cultural criticism, this work allows for new insights into an important facet of the Victorian age and of modernity: the rise of tour provider Thomas Cook in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the advent of mass, commercial travel. This thesis argues that the tourist, a relatively new discursive formation, embodies a number of modernity's discontents, from class anxieties to the spread of advanced capitalism as represented in the texts being studied. This thesis also demonstrates how the evolution of European-influenced tourism in Egypt became ripe for Gothic representation by the late-Victorian period. This study takes as its subject matter the imaginative Egyptian themed works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Marie Corelli, Guy Boothby, and William Warner, better known as Cheiro. Each of these authors were mass market literary and cultural forces in their own commercial arenas in an era identified by Kate Flint (2001) as intensely preoccupied over the reading habits of a nation now consuming fiction in mass numbers. Less attention has been paid in scholarship of the period to contemporary anxieties concerning the various and deeply significant changes brought about by the commercialising forces of a burgeoning tourism industry. This thesis proves that representations of these changes in popular fiction were bound up with questions of authorship, mass culture, and European cultural identity in the 1890s. This interdisciplinary work thus contributes to cultural scholarship of the period known as the Victorian fin de siécle through its focus on Egypt, tourism, and British occupation, therefore providing an essential and previously unconsidered perspective to existing scholarly debates.