Frost, Brian J. the Essential Guide to Mummy Literature. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2008. 232 Pp. Cloth. 978-0-8108-6039-1. $60.50
2011; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-0521
Autores Tópico(s)Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices
ResumoEssential Guide to Literature begins with a historical introduction and an evaluative history of mummy in fiction and film. These are followed by heart of book, an annotated bibliography of novels, young adult novels and children's storybooks, short stories and novelettes, poems, anthologies, nonfiction books, children's reference books, and literature and film guides. It ends with an extensive, chronological filmography and an index. As its contents indicate, this excellent example of seminal, pick-and-shovel scholarship would have been more appropriately titled Essential Guide to Literature, and Film, and Everything Else. This is also a wonderful example of what thorough theme research can produce. Many may be surprised that it enables mentioning Louisa May Alcott, Norman Mailer, and Anne Rice in same breath. introduction is an explication of purpose of mummification and a chronological survey of tomb discovery that begins in 1820 and ends in 1922 with excavation of Tutankhamen's resting place, its attendant mysteries including cause of his death, and rumors and media attention surrounding curse and studies of it up to Gerald O'Farrell's Tutankhamen Deception: True Story of Mummy's (2001), which suggests that Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvan made up curse to cover their tomb robbing and their theft of many of tomb's most valuable artifacts. What Frost doesn't mention is current practice of airing out tombs to avoid dangers of airborne spores and fungi. On surface, this history might seem superfluous, but Frost explains Egyptomania that gripped Europe following Napoleon's military expedition in 1798. scholars and scientists who accompanied him produced twenty-two-volume Description de l'Egypte (1809-28), which had a major impact on architecture, furnishings, and literature. The in Fiction and Films begins by demonstrating that mummy theme is a subset of living dead (or, perhaps, resurrected dead) as monsters while also illuminating fascination with beautiful female mummies, which is linked to Sleeping Beauty theme, as well as to fantasies of necrophilia and suspended animation. As Frost proceeds chronologically, beginning in late 300 BCE, he identifies motifs of revenge, other curses, reincarnation, fetishism, and non-standard sexualities as they connect to mummies. Frost discusses examples of mummy fiction from seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Beginning with twentieth century, this history highlights and describes important publications and quality of each decade's films and fiction. distinction Frost draws between creative and derivative is one of particularly valuable contributions of volume since quality can only be appreciated within context of entire canon, the good, bad, and ugly. As Frost details, first example in European literature of mummy fiction is an untitled story in Louis Penicher's Traite des Embaumements selon les Anciens et les Modernes in 1699, and first novel is anonymous, three-volume Mummy! A Tale of Twenty-Second Century in 1827 (rpt. 1994). first American example is an anonymous letter, Letter from a Revived Mummy, in New York Evening Mirror (1832), which Frost suggests is probably inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe's spoof Some Words with a Mummy (1845), both of which use galvanism as their mode of resurrection. Louisa May Alcott's Lost in a Pyramid; or, Mummy's Curse is recognized as one of earliest examples of mummy's curse (1832). Frost joins mummy with lost-race literature through H. Rider Haggard's She: A History of Adventure (1886); Cleopatra: Being an Account of Fall and Vengeance of Harmachis (1889); and King Solomon's Mines (1885). most bizarre late Victorian examples focus on love stories. Of note during this period are Charles Mackay's Twin Soul: Strange Experiments of Dr. …
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