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The Literary Archaeologies Of Théophile Gautier, Sasha Colby

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "The Literary Archaeologies of Théophile Gautier," Sasha Colby considers the relationship between archaeology as an emerging nineteenth-century discipline and the history of modern poetics. By explicating Gautier's fiction and poetry within an archaeological context, Colby suggests the ways in which archaeology became not only an intriguing subject for late romantics and early modernists but also the ways in which archaeology conditioned an excavational mode of fictional and poetic practice. Incorporating history, Egyptology, psychology, and literary theory, Colby explores the impact of the archaeological enterprise on the nineteenth-century imagination through the work of one of its most influential …