The Blackwell companion to the Bible in English literature / edited by Rebecca Lemon [and three others].

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This Companion explores the Bible's role and influence on individual writers, whilst tracing the key developments of Biblical themes and literary theory through the ages. An ambitious overview of the Bible's impact on English literature - as arguably the most powerful work of literature in history - from the medieval period through to the twentieth-century Includes introductory sections to each period giving background information about the Bible as a source text in English literature, and placing writers in their historical context Draws on examples from medieval, early-modern, eighteenth-century and Romantic, Victorian, and Modernist literature Includes many 'secular' or 'anti-clerical' writers alongside their 'Christian' contemporaries, revealing how the Bible's text shifts and changes in the writing of each author who reads and studies it

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Like any complex scholarly endeavor of many hands (in this case 50 contributors), this one is a hit-and-miss proposition. The scope of the project--a "wide-ranging and interdisciplinary examination of the Bible's role and influence in English literature"--bespeaks an effort to gauge the extent to which the Bible shaped the canon of English literature. But the methodology, which purports to build "on an existing body of criticism committed to recovering the doctrinal and faith commitments of individual writers by turning instead to their uses of the Bible as a shared textual focus," too often substitutes statistical data for the kind of complex humanistic and historical analysis that forms the foundation of contemporary scholarship in the humanities. Interestingly, many of the critical sleights of hand that allow scholars to see pretty much anything they choose anywhere they look are here omitted in favor of a pseudo-scientific reliance on the sheer number of incidences in which a particular author cites the Bible. This provides a good deal of opportunity for political tendentiousness and allows the number of times an author cites the Bible to determine the extent to which the Bible "mattered." Summing Up: Optional. Graduate students and researchers. D. Pesta University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh