This collection focuses on representations of Egypt between 1750 and 1956. Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition of 1798-1801 failed in military terms, but succeeded in focusing Western attention on the country. The nation fascinated travellers because of its antiquity, its monuments, and its bazaars. In the nineteenth-century, the typical itinerary for travellers included Alexandria, Cairo, the Pyramids, and a journey by boat up the Nile to the temples of Luxor and others. Some of the essays included in this volume focus on fiction by writers like Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens, or travel works by Florence Nightingale, Lucie Duff-Gordon, and Gérard de Nerval. Others analyse representations of Egypt by explorers, American ex-soldiers, French painters, British colonial administrators and sociologists, and a Russian doctor investigating the efficacy of Muhammad Ali’s reforms in relation to the plague. There is also a discussion of the changes in nineteenth-century Egyptian dress.

New media and its enormous diffusion in the last decades of the 20th century and up to the present has greatly increased and diversified the reception of Egyptian themes and motifs and Egyptian influence in various cultural spheres. This book seeks to provide new evidence of this interdisciplinarity between Egyptology and popular culture.