Between the book and the lamp: imaginative geographies of Egypt, 1849–50

This essay compares the imaginative geographies of Egypt produced by Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert as they travelled up the Nile Valley and back to Cairo in 1849–50. Their experiences are used to emphasize the physicality (rather than merely the textuality) of travel writing. The differences between their imaginative geographies and in particular between their representations of landscape, space and people, illuminate the complex and fractured formation of Orientalism as a constellation of power, knowledge and spatiality, and its entanglements with patriarchy, sexuality and various colonialisms.