| Shegyptology: Encounters with Egypt in 19th Century Literature and Culture explores gender issues circulating in representations of ancient Egypt in the West, focusing the writings of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Loudon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Helena Blavatsky, Rider Haggard, Gustave Flaubert, Amelia Edwards and Sigmund Freud as representatives of masculine and feminine responses. Psychoanalytic models of scopophilia; fetishism; preservative repression; the preoedipal mother; Kristeva's theories of the semiotic and the stranger; and Freud's concept of the uncanny are used to investigate cultural, psychic, and ideological currents as well as moments of discursive disruption. This study argues that Egypt's past exists as a unique contested territory in Western thought, situated on the fault lines of problematic gender categories and creating sites of cultural engagement and resistance that have been under-explored. As cultural patterns are re-examined in the context of phenomena associated with Egyptomania, Spiritualism, travel, psychical research and the development of psychoanalysis, the emergence of female subjectivity is considered as the a legacy of encounters with the "(m)other" of the West. |
