Victorian literature and archaeology: Contemporary excavations

This article surveys recent scholarship tracing archaeological discourse in Victorian literature. While scholars in the past two decades have produced many valuable works investigating the Victorian literature of science, archaeology's disciplinary fluidity and infancy in the 19th century have relegated it often to a marginal place in studies of imperialism, museum culture, or limited to brief mentions in studies of Victorian Hellenism or Egyptology. Recent work, however, locates archaeology at the center of Victorian literary explorations of gender, sexuality, material culture, temporality, and aesthetic form. Tracing many of these studies, and suggesting future directions for scholarship, this essay reveals how Victorian writers turned to archaeology to understand themselves and their modernity.