had the most vivid way of putting things—especially of the East. He had both a fine imaginative power and a memory richly stored not only from study but from personal experience….Burton knew the East. Its brilliant dawns and sunsets…the mysteries of its veiled women; its romances; its beauty; its horrors". Inspired by the stories of Egypt he heard, Stoker dedicated himself to the study of Egyptology; Stoker was known to own a number of texts on Egyptology, including William Wilde's Narratives of a Voyage to Madeira, Wallis Budge's Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Egyptian Religion: Egyptian Ideas on the Future Life, and Flinders Petrie's Egyptian Tales Translated from the Papyri. Genre Imperial Gothic The Jewel of Seven Stars, from its placement during the fin-de-siecle, is an example of Imperial Gothic. Influenced by anxiety over the decline of the British Empire, Imperial Gothic texts employ elements of Gothic literature, such as darkness, death, sexuality, and the occult, and combine them with concerns about imperialism, colonialism, and nineteenth-century politics. Brantlinger notes three key themes of Imperial Gothic: "individual regression or going native; an invasion of civilization by the forces of barbarism or demonism; and the diminution of opportunities for adventure and heroism in the modern world". Imperial Gothic is marked by a fear of the future, expressing these anxieties as supernatural events that are equally uncontrollable. The Jewel of Seven Stars represents a specific fear, which Brantlinger labels the "invasion scare story": in a reversal of the "outward thrust of imperialist adventure", a foreign body gains power and threatens the existing structure of civilization. In The Jewel of Seven Stars, Queen Tera's resurrection is the embodiment of this threat: "It was all so stupendous, so mysterious, so unnecessary! The issues were so vast; the danger so strange, so unknown. Even if it should be successful, what new difficulties would it not raise…there would be some strange and awful development—something unexpected and unpredictable—before the end should be allowed to come…!”. The confirmation of Tera's existence and her potential ability to return and invade Western civilization, shattering pre-existing beliefs about religion and science, reflects the anxieties brought on by the end of imperialism. This echoes the uncertainty of the future as the era of imperialism came to an end, and the idea of reverse colonialism became more prominent and terrifying. Gothic horror The Jewel of Seven Stars is part of a subgenre of Gothic