Ms Victoria Hinks-Sleep is Postgraduate research student within English at the University of Southampton.
I have completed an MA in English Literary Studies at the University of Southampton and hold a BA in English and Sociology from St Mary's University College. I have chosen to pursue my research interests at Southampton because of the newly launched Southampton Centre for Nineteenth-Century Research (SCNR).
My research interests include Gothic Horror and Science Fiction and the interrelationship between these two genres. My MPhil/PhD project at Southampton is on the historiography of Mummy fiction written in the long Nineteenth-Century. Mummy fiction aims to explain ancient history, but also shows a fascination with what would happen should the Mummies find themselves re-awakened in Victorian and Edwardian society. A desire to understand and control, sparked by seeing life in an unnatural state of preservation, converts the archaeologists of these fictions into mad scientists playing with a concoction of medicines and electricity as the definitive resurrection tools. Mummy fiction thus becomes a barometer of the period's changing attitudes and fears towards science.
The thesis, provisionally entitled ‘Science, Pseudoscience and Paranormal Entertainment: Crossing the boundaries between life, death and resurrection in Mummy fiction during the long Nineteenth-Century', will focus on science, pseudo-science, paranormal entertainment, and the crossing of boundaries between life, death and resurrection. I will examine the Victorian and Edwardian fascination with the afterlife and how spiritualism and mesmerism were accepted alongside scientific developments to investigate mortality. My aim is to explain the direction Mummy fiction takes and how, by the turn of the century, these burgeoning ‘scientific' fields drive increasing levels of violence within the texts.