Maps, Razors, Monocles, Diamonds: Reading H. R. Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines through the lenses of Victorian Material Culture

Authors

  • Elena Emma Sottilotta

Keywords:

King Solomon’s Mines, Henry Rider Haggard, British Empire, Postcolonial Studies, Thing Theory, Victorian Material Culture

Abstract

This article proposes a cultural analysis of Henry Rider Haggard’s nineteenth-century classic King Solomon’s Mines (1885) through an interdisciplinary perspective that draws from Victorian material culture, Thing theory and postcolonial studies. The ways in which objects contribute to the characters’ delineation will be taken into consideration in order to analyse the function they perform in relation to the mythopoeia of the British Empire and to the novel’s blatant racism and implicit colonial politics. In terms of methodology, a close reading of the text will be carried out in an attempt to investigate the boundaries between fiction and reality and the extent to which objects become symbols of an epoch and emblems of the Empire.

Author Biography

  • Elena Emma Sottilotta

    Elena Emma Sottilotta is an alumna of the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, where she graduated in the context of the EU-funded Joint Mundus Masters Programme in Literary, Cultural and Visual Studies Crossways in Cultural Narratives. She holds an Italian Master of Arts summa cum laude in European and Pan-American Languages and Literatures from the University of Bergamo and a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude in Foreign Languages and Cultures from the University of Roma Tre, where she graduated after one year abroad at University College Dublin. She is currently a Fulbright Fellow at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, United States. Her research interests hinge on comparative literature, gender studies, folklore and fairy-tale narratives, and interdisciplinary approaches to nineteenth-century studies.

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Published

03-03-2018

How to Cite

“Maps, Razors, Monocles, Diamonds: Reading H. R. Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines through the Lenses of Victorian Material Culture”. 2018. Estrema: Interdisciplinary Journal of Humanities 1 (11): 21. https://estrema.letras.ulisboa.pt/ojs/index.php/estrema/article/view/157.