Jay Sullivan
20202020

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Research projects

Touching The Past: Mummy Fiction, The Masculine Middlebrow & The Sensory Space of Late Victorian Museum Culture 1884-1919

2019 to present 

My theses examines the relationship between late-Victorian mummy fiction — also known as the Egyptian gothic — and museum space. Many of the works to be studied contain detailed sensory descriptions of touch, sight, sound, and smell while the constellation of writers and readers producing them can be demarcated as the ‘masculine middlebrow. ’ The particular negotiation of these works of the 1880s and the 1890s concerns both sensory immediacy and the cerebral, and finds a distinctive narrative momentum in depictions of the late-century museum and in the figure of the mummy.