Treasure in Literature and Culture

Treasure and treasure hunting are vast themes in literature and culture, yet have so far not received much sustained and coherent academic interest. The present collection of essays approaches treasure and treasure hunts in literature and culture from the Renaissance to the present. It asks questions about the legal, social, and cultural role of treasure, especially in connection with its links with gender and sexuality. The essays of the collection deal with Renaissance documents and their depiction of legal struggles over treasure, Romantic conceptions of the self as treasure, American nineteenth-century views of treasure, decadent treasure hunters in British and German literature, the link between imperial and domestic treasures in Victorian fiction, the emptying of treasure in Modernist fiction, intertextual and intermedial uses of treasure in opera and fiction, the treasuring of identity in the context of race in modern American writing, nature as treasure in ecocritical contemporary fiction, and AIDS medication as treasure in present-day South Africa.