The Solomonic Fantasy
The Political Unconscious of the Imperialized Yehudites
by Sonia Kwok Wong
Paperback (Published)
(August 2025)
ISBN: 9783161611049
6.06 x 9.09 inches
Price: $138.00
In stock
This work is a postcolonial-psychoanalytic study of 1 Kings 1:1-12:24. Using Freudian theories, Sonia Kwok Wong argues that the Solomonic Kingdom is a cultural fantasy reflecting the Persian Judeans’ ambivalent wish to take the place of their Persian overlords while also critiquing their oppressive traits.
This study takes on a historical-critical approach to the analysis of the Solomonic narrative (1 Kings 1:1-12:24) within the larger Deuteronomistic (Hi)Story (DH) by employing a postcolonial-psychoanalytic reading strategy. Sonia Wong argues that the DH is a cumulative, composite text which originated in the late fourth-century-BCE Persian Yehud. Through a Freudian model of fantasy as a disguised fulfillment for a repressed wish, Wong argues that the Solomonic Kingdom is a cultural fantasy that reflects the imperialized Yehudites’ ambivalent wish to take the dominant, privileged position of the Persian imperializer through a pacifist mode of domination and to critique the imperializer’s oppressive traits. The study provides a detailed textual analysis of the fantasy-thoughts, traces the fantasy-sources to the Persian context, and describes the psychic mechanisms involved in the fantasy-work.
- By (author) Sonia Kwok Wong
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