A travel to ancient Egypt: the relationship between present and past in Gustave Flaubert’s board narrative

Abstract

The Ancient Egypt has always attracted the attention of othercivilizations. Since the end of the 18th century, the West, mainly England and France, turns its eyes more carefully to the East in order to acquire a greater knowledge about those civilizations, articulating a discourse called Orientalism. Based on the literary work of Gustave Flaubert entitled Voyage en Egypte: octobre 1849-juillet 1850, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate how this discourse was present in European society, influencing the relationships among western and eastern peoples. An analysis of the representations that derived from the orientalist discourse idealized about the Ancient Egypt along the 19th century wascarried out with the objective to show that such discourse created animage of the East in order to justify the domination exerted in thatregion.