The carnival spirit and grotesque in Jane C. Loudon's The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century

Illustrating a grotesque combination of utopian science fiction, the gothic, and fantasy genres, Jane C. Webb Loudon's The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) stands as one of the precursors of modern science fiction, however, its contributions to the literary body of speculative fiction have remained overshadowed without an adequate amount of scholarly study. The present thesis aims to read Jane C. Webb Loudon's The Mummy! as an epitome of the carnivalesque novel in the framework of Bakhtinian discourse through three main chapters. In the first chapter, the carnivalesque text of the novel will be investigated through the novel's polyphonic (dialogic) composition that incorporates polyglossia, heteroglossia, and parody. It will be discussed that The Mummy! embodies the anticanonical nature of the novel genre as theorized by Bakhtin. Besides, intertextuality and metafiction will be evaluated as carnivalesque characteristics in the textual fabric of the novel. Weaving a thread between Kristevan abject and Bakhtinian grotesque, the second chapter will concentrate on the mummy of Cheops, the first reanimated mummy in English literature, and define him as a carnivalesque monster, which subverts the conventional portrayal of the gothic monster, to establish Cheops' place among the monsters of literature. In the final chapter, the novel's utopian science fiction narrative will be analysed by employing Darko Suvin's cognitive estrangement in relation with uncanny and grotesque. The chapter will unfold the novel's satirical critique of the socio-political, cultural, literary, and historical dimensions of the writer's period, reflecting the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution in tandem with the political instability, scientific progress, ecological destruction, and imperialism that defined her time.