Literature and the Bible: A Reader

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book traces the emergence and development of Literature and the Bible as a field of scholarship, presenting key critical essays alongside more recent criticism that explores new directions. The Western literary tradition has a long and complex relationship with the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Authors draw on the Bible in numerous ways and for different reasons, and there is also the myriad of subconscious ways through which the biblical text enters literary culture. Biblical stories, characters, motifs and references permeate the whole of the literary tradition.

In the last thirty years there has been a growth of critical interest in this relationship. In Literature and the Bible: A Reader the editors bring together a selection of the key critical and theoretical materials from this time, providing a comprehensive resource for students and scholars.

Eachnbsp;chapter contains:

* An introduction from the editors, contextualising the material within and alerting readers to some of the historic debates that feed into the extracts chosen

* A set of previously published extracts of substantial length, offering greater contextualisation and allowing the Reader to be used flexibly

* Lists of further reading, providing readers with a wide variety of other sources and perspectives.

Designed to be used alongside the Bible and selected literary texts, this book is essential reading for anyone studying Literature and the Bible in undergraduate English, Religion and Theology degrees.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements (p. vii)
• General Introduction (p. xi)
• Part I The Relationship Between Literature and the Bible (p. 1)
• 1 Introducing the Study of Literature and the Bible (p. 3)
• a Odysseus' Scar (p. 8)
• b Introduction to The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (p. 15)
• c Literary Text, Literary Approach: Getting the Questions Straight (p. 26)
• d The Critic as Kabbalist: Harold Bloom and the Heretic Hermeneutic (p. 33)
• 2 Ways of Reading (p. 43)
• a Ways of Reading the Bible: The Problem of the Transparent Text (p. 46)
• b Scripture upon Scripture (p. 54)
• c On the Jewish Reading of Scriptures (p. 62)
• d The Struggle for the Text (p. 74)
• 3 Reception History (p. 86)
• a Asymmetry Between Text and Reader (p. 89)
• b Language and Hermeneutics (p. 94)
• c Taking Stock: Survivals, Hauntings, Jonah and (Stanley) Fish, and the Christian Colonisation of the Book of Jonah (p. 104)
• Part II Literary Reading (p. 115)
• 4 Translation (p. 117)
• a The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens (p. 121)
• b Introduction to The Making of the English Bible (p. 128)
• c To the Reader (p. 138)
• d Des Tours de Babel (p. 145)
• e Thou Art Translated: Bible Translating, Heretic Reading and Cultural Transformation (p. 155)
• 5 Multivocality (p. 165)
• a Discourse in the Novel (p. 169)
• b Toward a New Theory of Midrash (p. 177)
• c Psalm and Anti-Psalm: A Personal View (p. 189)
• d Reading Job as Theological Disruption for a Post-Holocaust World (p. 200)
• 6 Metaphor and Allegory (p. 213)
• a The Double Vision of Language (p. 215)
• b The Nuptial Metaphor (p. 221)
• c Song of Solomon: The Allegorical Imperative (p. 228)
• Part III Theological Interpretation (p. 237)
• 7 Parables (p. 239)
• a Hoti's Business: Why are Narratives Obscure? (p. 242)
• b Parable and Performative in the Gospels and in Modern Literature (p. 252)
• c The Parable: The Primary Form (p. 262)
• d "The Agent of a Superior": Stewardship Parables in Our Mutual Friend (p. 270)
• 8 Genesis (p. 280)
• a Preface to the Second Edition of Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (p. 284)
• b "And the sea was no more": Chaos vs. Creation (p. 289)
• c Adam, Eve and the Serpent: Mark Twain (p. 298)
• d First Memories and Second Thoughts (p. 306)
• 9 Salvation, Transformation and Apocalypse (p. 313)
• a Suffering and Incarnation (p. 318)
• b Epistemology of the Closet (p. 328)
• c Facing the End (p. 334)
• d Wordsworth's Apocalypse (p. 339)
• Bibliography (p. 356)
• Index (p. 365)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This reader comprises excerpts from previously published theoretical essays (of the past 30 years) that connect the Bible and literature in its broadest sense--approaching the Bible from such perspectives as reader reception, new historicism, deconstruction, gender theory, Jewishness, and theology. The editors bring together material from such writers as Mikhail Bakhtin, who discourses on multivocality, and Jonathan Roberts, who discusses the theme of apocalypse in Book IV of William Wordsworth's Prelude. Some of the best essays in the reader concern translation: one by Gerald Hammond, who argues for a literal rendering in translating rather than an interpretive one that defines one meaning for the reader; one by Robert Alter, who argues for keeping the "profound and haunting enigmas"; one by Valentine Cunningham, who discusses the Bible reading of the eponymous hero of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, a novel that essentially translated the Bible for English readers and established the novel form, providing for those readers "the moral education of the self." The introduction says that the book is designed as a reader for undergraduate courses, but a more advanced audience will process the abstractions better. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. M. S. Stephenson University of Texas at Brownsville