The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Religion
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 1790

Beschreibung

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

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Praise for The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature

Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Religion

Title page

Copyright page

Contributors

PART I: Introduction

CHAPTER 1: General Introduction

Literature and Theology

Christianity and Literature

Religion and Literature

The Bible as Literature

“The Bible and Literature”

Note on Terms

CHAPTER 2: The Literature of the Bible

What Is the Bible?

The Bible as Literature

The Biblical Genres

Biblical Hermeneutics

Types of Exegesis

CHAPTER 3: Biblical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory

PART II: Medieval

CHAPTER 4: Introduction

1

2

CHAPTER 5: Old English Poetry

CHAPTER 6: The Medieval Religious Lyric

CHAPTER 7: The Middle English Mystics

CHAPTER 8: The Pearl-Poet

Introduction

Translating the Bible

Social Theology

The Pearl-poet’s Bible

CHAPTER 9: William Langland

Biblical Quotations

Reading Piers Plowman: Two Scholarly Disputes

Bible Stories and Characters

Personifications of the Bible in Piers Plowman

The Influence of Biblical Forms and Styles

Biblical Ideals

Conclusion

CHAPTER 10: Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer’s Biblical Milieu

Serious and Non-ironic References to Scripture in Chaucer’s Poetry

Comic and Ironic References to Scripture in Chaucer’s Poetry

Misuses of Scripture by Chaucerian Characters: (i) Unwitting Misuses

Misuses of Scripture by Chaucerian Characters: (ii) Knowing Clerical Misuses

Misuses of Scripture by Chaucerian Characters: (iii) Knowing Female Misuses

Conclusion

PART III: Early Modern

CHAPTER 11: Introduction

The Availability and Pervasiveness of the Bible

The Paradoxical Death of Biblical Drama

Attacking and Defending Literature from the Bible

Ways of Reading, Ways of Writing

The Beginning and End

CHAPTER 12: Early Modern Women

CHAPTER 13: Early Modern Religious Prose

Tyndale and Citation

Southwell and Paraphrase

Donne and the Poetry of Prose

Bunyan and Neobiblicism

CHAPTER 14: Edmund Spenser

CHAPTER 15: Mary Sidney

CHAPTER 16: William Shakespeare

I

II

CHAPTER 17: John Donne

CHAPTER 18: George Herbert

The Praise and Use of Scripture

Scripture the Way into The Temple

Scripture at the Far End of The Temple

Beginnings and Endings

Herbert as Scriptural Maker

Old Testament/New Testament

CHAPTER 19: John Milton

The Psalmist

Biblical Vocation

The Celebrant

Prophetic Milton

The Sonnets

The Trinity College Manuscript

Hebraism versus Hellenism

The Hermeneut

Milton’s Bibles

The Major Poems

Conclusion

CHAPTER 20: John Bunyan

CHAPTER 21: John Dryden

Scriptural Politics

Interpretation

Conclusion

PART IV: Eighteenth Century and Romantic

CHAPTER 22: Introduction

CHAPTER 23: Eighteenth-Century Hymn Writers

CHAPTER 24: Daniel Defoe

CHAPTER 25: Jonathan Swift

The Homiletic/Sermonic

The Proverbial

The Jocular

The Mock Biblical

Conclusion

CHAPTER 26: William Blake

CHAPTER 27: Women Romantic Poets

Hannah More

Felicia Hemans

Conclusion

CHAPTER 28: William Wordsworth

Wordsworth’s Parabolic Style

“Lines Written with a Slate-Pencil upon a Stone”

Wordsworth in Babylon

CHAPTER 29: S. T. Coleridge

Nature, the Bible, and the Imagination

Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit

The Role of Sense Experience

Coleridge Reads Genesis

The Place of Narrative

Study and Prayer

CHAPTER 30: Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility

Pride and Prejudice

Mansfield Park

The Prototypical Destiny of the Heroine

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 31: George Gordon Byron

Childe Harold

Beppo

Don Juan

Hebrew Melodies

Cain: A Mystery

CHAPTER 32: P. B. Shelley

Prophecy and History

The Book of Job

Redemption and Hope

Imagination not Faith

PART V: Victorian

CHAPTER 33: Introduction

The Bible as Intertext

The Materiality of Biblical Text

Biblical Criticism and Literature

CHAPTER 34: The Brownings

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Robert Browning

CHAPTER 35: Alfred Tennyson

CHAPTER 36: The Brontës

CHAPTER 37: John Ruskin

“That Property of Chapters”: Biblical Reading and Preaching

“A Subject of Thought”: Sacred Texts in Nature and Art

Critical Controversies and Social Polemics

A New Evangelicalism

CHAPTER 38: George Eliot

CHAPTER 39: Christina Rossetti

Williams, Keble, Augustine

Upholding Tradition

Reading the Bible

A Living Scripture

CHAPTER 40: G. M. Hopkins

CHAPTER 41: Sensation Fiction

CHAPTER 42: Decadence

Decadent Scriptures: (Ir)religious Faith at the Fin de Siècle

Out of Darkness: Wilde’s Gospels

PART VI: Modernist

CHAPTER 43: Introduction

Modernity as Theoretical, Axiomatic Autonomy

Modernity as Practical, Institutional Autonomy

Literature as the Cultural Salvation of the Bible in Fragments?

Disenchanting Fragmentation or Magical Collage?

CHAPTER 44: W. B. Yeats

Rose, Cross, and Celtic Christianity

Christ and the Christian Era

Yeats’s Christian Mystery Plays

CHAPTER 45: Virginia Woolf

Bible Study

The Search for Paradise

Literature and Dogma

CHAPTER 46: James Joyce

CHAPTER 47: D. H. Lawrence

Reading the Bible Differently

Adam and Eve Re-Enter Paradise

Christ Crucified and Risen

CHAPTER 48: T. S. Eliot

CHAPTER 49: The Great War Poets

Pastoral Idyll: The Lost Eden

Old Testament Narratives

The Language of the Old Testament

Christ’s Teachings, Suffering, and Sacrifice

The Book of Revelation

Conclusion: Bearing Witness

Index

Praise for The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature

“This is indeed a true companion, one that succeeds in its aim of being both scholarly and accessible to all lovers of English literature. In short, all students of English literature ought to put aside a month to read and study this book before going up to university.”

Church Times

“Probably what comes across most clearly is how, and that, many of the writers chose deliberately to draw on the Bible, and for students increasingly unfamiliar with the Bible, this approach challenges as well as informs.”

Reference Reviews

“An extremely useful volume.”

The Year’s Work in English Studies

Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Religion

The Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Religion series presents a collection of the most recent scholarship and knowledge about world religions. Each volume draws together newly-commissioned essays by distinguished authors in the field, and is presented in a style which is accessible to undergraduate students, as well as scholars and the interested general reader. These volumes approach the subject in a creative and forward-thinking style, providing a forum in which leading scholars in the field can make their views and research available to a wider audience.

Recently Published

The Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion    Edited by Robert A. SegalThe Blackwell Companion to the Qur’n    Edited by Andrew RippinThe Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought    Edited by Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi‘The Blackwell Companion to the Bible and Culture    Edited by John F. A. SawyerThe Blackwell Companion to Catholicism    Edited by James J. Buckley, Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt, and Trent PomplunThe Blackwell Companion to Eastern Christianity    Edited by Ken ParryThe Blackwell Companion to the Theologians    Edited by Ian S. MarkhamThe Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature    Edited by Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, John Roberts, and Christopher RowlandThe Blackwell Companion to the New Testament    Edited by David E. AuneThe Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth Century Theology    Edited by David FergussonThe Blackwell Companion to Religion in America    Edited by Philip GoffThe Blackwell Companion to Jesus    Edited by Delbert BurkettThe Blackwell Companion to Paul    Edited by Stephen WesterholmThe Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence    Edited by Andrew R. MurphyThe Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, Second Edition    Edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel WellsThe Wiley-Blackwell Companion Practical Theology    Edited by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemoreThe Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Religion and Social Justice    Edited by Michael D. Palmer and Stanley M. BurgessThe Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Chinese Religions    Edited by Randall L. NadeauThe Wiley-Blackwell Companion to African Religions    Edited by Elias Kifon BongmbaThe Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism    Edited by Julia A. Lamm

This paperback edition first published 2012

© 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Edition History: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2009)

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Blackwell companion to the Bible and English literature / edited by

Rebecca Lemon . . . [et al.].

p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to religion)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-3160-5 (hbk.) – ISBN 978-0-470-67499-4 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-1-4443-2418-1 (epdf)

ISBN 978-1-1182-4115-8 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-4443-2127-2 (mobi)

1. English literature–History and criticism. 2. Bible and literature. 3. Bible–

Influence. 4. Bible–In literature. I. Lemon, Rebecca, 1968– II. Title. III. Series.

2008047964

PR149.B5B5 2009

820.9′3822–dc22

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Contributors

Daniel Anlezark, University of Durham

Helen Barr, University of Oxford

Bernard Beatty, University of Liverpool

Dinah Birch, University of Liverpool

Kirstie Blair, University of Oxford

Ward Blanton, University of Glasgow

Penny Bradshaw, University of Cumbria

Andrew Bradstock, University of Otago

Catherine a. M. Clarke, Swansea University

Elizabeth Clarke, University of Warwick

Valentine Cunningham, University of Oxford

Graham Davidson, Coleridge Society

Sister Mary Clemente Davlin, OP, Dominican University, River Forest

John Drury, University of Oxford

Paul S. Fiddes, Regent’s Park College

William Franke, Vanderbilt University

David Fuller, University of Durham

Michael Giffin, independent scholar

Douglas Gray, University of Oxford

Hannibal Hamlin, The Ohio State University

Wolf Z. Hirst, University of Haifa

Douglas L. Howard, Suffolk County Community College in Selden

David Jasper, University of Glasgow

Elisabeth Jay, Oxford Brookes University

Carol V. Kaske, Cornell University

Mark Knight, Roehampton University

Charles LaPorte, University of Washington

Edward Larrissy, Queen’s University Belfast

Rebecca Lemon, University of Southern California

Michael LIeb, University of Illinois at Chicago

Elizabeth Ludlow, University of Warwick

Emma Mason, University of Warwick

Julie Maxwell, independent scholar and novelist, Oxford

Kevin Mills, University of Glamorgan

Roger Pooley, Keele University

Jane Potter, Oxford Brookes University

Stephen Prickett, University of Glasgow

Gerard Reedy, S.J., Fordham University

Jonathan Roberts, University of Liverpool

Christopher Rowland, University of Oxford

Jeanne Shami, University of Regina, Canada

Michael F. Suarez, S.J., Fordham University in New York, and Campion Hall, Oxford

Annie Sutherland, Somerville College, Oxford

Andrew Tate, Lancaster University

Marianne Thormählen, Lund University

J. R. Watson, University of Durham

Deeanne Westbrook, Portland State

Christiania Whitehead, University of Warwick

T. R. Wright, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Rivkah Zim, King’s College London

PART I Introduction

1 General Introduction

Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, and Jonathan Roberts

2 The Literature of the Bible

Christopher Rowland

3 Biblical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory

David Jasper

CHAPTER 1

General Introduction

Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, and Jonathan Roberts

“The Bible and literature” is a more specific field than it might first appear, and differs significantly from the ostensibly similar fields of: (a) “literature and theology”; (b) “Christianity and literature”; (c) “religion and literature”; and (d) “the Bible as literature.” We begin by taking a moment to differentiate these projects as a means to showing where this volume sits in relation to them.

Literature and Theology

A writer can be theologically complex but have comparatively little of the Bible in his or her work (for example, T. S. Eliot), or, by contrast, may freely deploy biblical allusion but have little obvious theology (such as Virginia Woolf). For this reason there is only a partial intersection between “theology and literature” and “the Bible and literature.” Studies within the former field are often strongly theorized, not least because of the symbiotic relationship between literary studies and theology. The theo-philosophical work of thinkers such as Paul Tillich, Paul Ricoeur, Hans Georg Gadamer, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Martin Buber, for example, has foreshadowed a modern theoretical re-evaluation of literature that in turn has given way to a renewed interest in religious questions. The religiously inflected critical inquiry of writers such as Geoffrey Hartman, Luce Irigaray, J. Hillis Miller, Terry Eagleton, and John Schad has developed this tradition further, and provoked Stanley Fish, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2005), to declare that religion might “succeed high theory and race, gender and class as the centre of intellectual energy in academe.” The field is well served by the journal Literature and Theology, as well as the recent Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology.

Christianity and Literature

“Christianity and literature” is distinct from “the Bible and literature” both because the former (like “literature and theology”) need not address the Bible itself, and because “Christianity and literature” implies a focus on a faith perspective, whereas “the Bible and literature” does not (one need not identify as Jewish or Christian to draw on the Bible). “Christianity and literature” has a different range from “literature and theology” because the former might consider, for example, ecclesiastical or liturgical matters that do not necessarily coincide with theology. The presence of vicars and parsonage life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction may have much to say about the lived experience of Christianity as life under a social institution, but does not necessarily entail discussion of conventional theological concerns such as the Incarnation, Trinity, or Resurrection. In practice, however, the faith orientation of “Christianity and literature” does tend to press it in a more reflective, didactic, or occasionally evangelizing direction. In one sense, the field is as old as the New Testament, as Christian writers (such as Paul) can be seen rereading Jewish Scripture in the light of their new faith within the Bible itself. These early typological readings are extended through a long history of attempts to read Christian echoes in texts from The Odyssey through to The Lord of the Rings. In the twentieth century, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis became both proponents and subjects of this approach, as Lewis’s 1944 essay “Myth Became Fact” and Joseph Pearce’s 1998 Tolkien: Man and Myth exemplify.

As with “literature and theology,” in addition to these author-based studies, there are numerous journals dedicated to the topic: “The Conference on Christianity and Literature” and its associated journal Christianity and Literature is one of the longest-standing. There have also been numerous anthologies of essays in this field including David Barratt et al, The Discerning Reader: Christian Perspectives on Literature and Theory (1995), and, more recently, Paul Cavill and Heather Ward’s The Christian Tradition in English Literature: Poetry, Plays, and Shorter Prose (2007).

Religion and Literature

“Religion and literature” is of a different order of magnitude, as it no longer deals with one religious text, but potentially with many texts, many gods, and many varieties of religious experience. It overlaps with “literature and theology” but goes beyond the Judeo-Christian traditions into the major world religions (see Tomoko Masuzawa’s The Invention of World Religions for a helpful introduction to this area). The most inclusive of the categories discussed here, this area also includes work on psychology (Carl Jung), belief (Slavoj Žižek and John D. Caputo), and ethics (Richard Rorty and Donna Haraway). Journals such as Religion and Literature have long been connected with this field, while new series like Continuum’s eclectic “New Directions in Religion and Literature” are suggestive of the evolving range of approaches and relevant texts opened up by the interplay between the two disciplines.

The Bible as Literature

The ongoing debate over the relationship between literature and the Bible is not a historical curiosity, but is grounded in the fact that the Bible itself is literature. As writers such as Murray Roston (Prophet and Poet: the Bible and the Growth of Romanticism, 1965) argue, this idea materialized in the sixteenth century with the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, and again in the eighteenth century due to a newfound interest in the principles of Hebrew poetics. The story of that rediscovery can be found in this volume (see Stephen Prickett’s introduction to the eighteenth century), but the reception of the Bible as a book of (among other things) poetry seems to have been a discovery for – and a surprise to – every generation since. The Romantic recognition of the biblical prophets as poets (and therefore Romantic poets’ self-recognition as prophets) segued into newly articulated forms of agnosticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that found “the Bible as literature” an agreeable solution to a text at the center of their culture, the nature of which had gradually come to seem less clear. One result of this is that the Bible itself comes to be repackaged in editions such as Charles Allen Dinsmore’s The English Bible as Literature (1931) and Ernest Sutherland Bates’s The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature (1937).

The current sustained wave of interest in the Bible as literature owes much to Frank Kermode and Robert Alter’s Literary Guide to the Bible (1987), which was preceded by Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy (1979) and Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative (1981). At a time when literary theory was at the height of its influence in the 1980s, Kermode and Alter’s work showed that it was of equal significance to the work of biblical scholars, and that the Bible is composed of many diverse and disruptive examples of linguistic play and meaning.

“The Bible and Literature”

The range of studies pertaining to the fields outlined above is extensive. Nonetheless, many of the works (particularly academic monographs) written on “religion” and particular authors would not fall into any of these categories. This is because while religion has been the subject of an increasing focus in literary studies in recent years, this has taken place primarily via the recovery of historical contexts and period discourses. To take one example, the past decade or so has witnessed the publication of many books on Romantic religion. These books, however, have focused almost exclusively on the recovery of, for instance, the dissenting cultures of William Blake’s London, rather than his engagement with the Bible itself. This is a generalization, but indicates a trend. So, while the recovery of a history and hermeneutics of religion has been wide-ranging and essential to the very field of religion and literature to which this volume speaks, consideration of the uses that specific writers have found for the Bible has been comparatively underplayed. The foundations for this collection, David Lyle Jeffrey’s A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (1992), Stephen Prickett and David Jasper’s The Bible and Literature: A Reader (1999) and David Norton’s A History of the Bible as Literature (2000), have begun to redress this anomaly. Jeffrey presents the reader with an encyclopedic resource book detailing the appearance of biblical images and characters in later literature; Prickett and Jasper construct a helpful teaching book, offering groupings of extracts of literary texts by theme; and Norton provides a thorough historical trajectory of the subject. The present volume supplements these works by offering sustained and detailed analyses of the use of the Bible by specific authors, the majority of whom receive an entire chapter written by an expert on that particular writer. This volume also supplements these earlier studies by providing discussions, within many of the chapters, of the versions of the Bible available to, and influential on, these authors. As a result of this historical attention to Bible translation, both terms – “Bible” and “literature” – as engaged in this volume are capacious and mobile: there are varieties of Bibles influencing these authors, just as there are varieties of literature (drama, poetry, prose, memoir). The descriptor “the Bible and literature,” then, is a means to taking a kind of textual engagement as a common denominator, rather than any more qualitative judgment grounded in adherence to a particular tradition, or maintenance of a particular belief.

Accessibility has been a key aim of this volume, and we have attempted to commission essays that will be usable by the widest audience. As the principal audience is expected to be students of literature, we have sought to include authors who typically appear on undergraduate syllabi; this has meant a selection that could certainly be described as canonical, and located within a specific geography, since we have concentrated on writers who are British or who worked substantially in the British Isles. We hope that this volume might help to inspire scholars and/or students to undertake other, complementary studies of literature and the Bible, in languages other than English, in countries outside of Britain, and through a selection of authors more wide-ranging than we could undertake here. We thus offer this volume as an aid in understanding the vast influence of the Bible on English literature, rather than as a definitive and exhaustive study of the topic. There are, inevitably, omissions: while in the case of some authors, we would have liked to invite several scholars to have written on them, in the case of others, we had great difficulty commissioning anyone at all. This was an unexpected but instructive aspect of compiling the volume. We learned that the authors whom one might most quickly identify as “religious” and in whose critical reception “religion” has featured may not, in fact, have stimulated much (if any) discussion of their biblical usages; and often it is the least religious (or at least the most anti-clerical) writers – Byron, Blake, Lawrence, for example – who are the most biblical.

Perhaps the most difficult editorial decision concerned the date range of the volume. After much discussion and consultation we decided to stop at what is sometimes called “high modernism”: the writer born latest in the collection is T. S. Eliot. However, this was not, perhaps surprisingly, due to a diminished interest in the Bible among later twentieth and twenty-first century writers. Quite the reverse: had we gone later, there would be a wealth of choices: Douglas Coupland, William Golding, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Jennings, David Jones, C. S. Lewis, Philip Roth, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Jeanette Winterson, to name just a few. Amidst this range it would be difficult to make the sort of canonical selection that characterizes the rest of the volume; and length restrictions would mean that looking at some of the more interesting modern authors here would mean losing authors from earlier periods. As mentioned above, here too we hope that the volume offers a foundation for further study and research both into those authors we were unable to include and into new perspectives on those writers that are discussed here.

One of the most illuminating aspects of editing the collection has been seeing the different approaches that our contributors have taken to the subject matter. Without wishing to attempt to provide a typology of approaches, a selection of the chapters that follow is noted here to indicate the variety of critical approaches to be found in this collection.

Catherine Clarke’s essay on Old English poetry begins the medieval section, offering a history of the Bible as an object of aristocratic exchange. Clarke’s approach helps to illuminate how, to a large degree, the study of the Bible and literature concerns the history of the book itself. In contrast to her attention to book and manuscript circulation in England, other authors such as Douglas Gray (the medieval religious lyric), Christiania Whitehead (Chaucer), and Carol Kaske (Spenser) illuminate the range of specific ways in which authors engage with the Bible in their literary production. We see how historical authors draw on the Bible in numerous ways: typologically, allegorically, figuratively, affectively, and liturgically, to name only a few. These chapters are suggestive of the flexibility of biblical engagement, which extends beyond intertextual reference. Yet close attention to the nature of intertextual reference is itself revealing and several essays in these opening sections concentrate on how authors favour specific sections of the Bible. Here, Jeanne Shami’s essay on Donne is exemplary. In tracking Donne’s engagement with both the Psalms and Paul, her chapter engages Donne’s vast meditations on the Bible, ranging from his essays to his sermons to his devotions to his poems, demonstrating continuity within his diverse writings. Yet another approach in our medieval and early modern sections illuminates the relation between biography and faith. Michael Lieb’s essay is particularly instructive on how and why Milton engages with the Bible; Lieb gives a keen sense of the drama of this engagement, tracing the variations and continuities in the form of Milton’s biblical influences. Similarly, Rivkah Zim’s essay illuminates how Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, produces her translation of the Psalms from her position as an activist Protestant aristocrat.

The chapters in the remaining three parts of the volume are no less various. Valentine Cunningham, for example, grants the reader access to Defoe’s biblical world through an anatomy of Defoe’s use of particular scriptural words. Michael Giffin, by contrast, steps back and discerns a set of grand biblical themes in Austen’s work, locating a particular worldview and faith position that he shares as an Anglican priest. For Deanne Westbrook, Wordsworth’s hidden biblical allusions materialize as figure and parable, modes of linguistic articulation able to accommodate divine mystery even as they acknowledge the “fallen” nature of language so prevalent in The Prelude. Penny Bradshaw’s approach to Romantic women’s poetry, on the other hand, implements a historio-feminist methodology to highlight how these writers engaged with the ostensibly patriarchal traditions of divine and biblical poetics. Focusing on Hannah More and Felicia Hemans, Bradshaw suggests that they interrogate their relationship with the Bible as a way of finding an otherwise unavailable perspective on contemporary questions of gender and female voice. Ruskin too felt compelled to reassess the scriptural authority he had so meticulously studied in his youth, Dinah Birch shows us, but did so by sustaining a textual scrutiny of the Bible. Andrew Tate uses the framework of fin de siècle decadence to read Wilde’s aesthetic exegesis of the Gospels, one that continually collapses into a Gospel-driven moralism removed from the sensuous spirituality with which Wilde is conventionally associated. By the time we arrive at Joyce, William Franke shows, the “Word” of the Bible can be realized only in a fractured human language comprising biblical, colloquial and liturgical allusions alike.

As this brief overview indicates, the contributions to this volume are rich and diverse, and the insight they offer into the Bible and literature lies not only in their individual content, but in their range as a collection: they show the Bible and literature to be an infinitely complex topic, as the Bible changes in the hands of each author that reads it, modulating according to the style and theme of each literary work, and in the forms of belief and disbelief that underlie them.

Each of the five period sections in this volume – medieval literature, early-modern literature; eighteenth-century and Romantic literature; Victorian literature; and Modernism – is preceded by a general introduction. The volume begins, however, with two broad essays that set the scene: Christopher Rowland offers a perspective from biblical studies on the nature and genre of the Bible; and then David Jasper surveys interpretive approaches to that text in his chapter on biblical hermeneutics and literary theory.

Note on Terms

A number of terms used in this volume have alternative, regional, or contested forms. These include the use of “Old Testament” or “Hebrew Bible”; of BC/AD or BCE/CE; of “the King James version” or “the Authorized Version”; and of variants such as “Paul,” “St Paul,” and “Paul the Apostle.” Rather than theologically or politically sanctioning one or other sets of these terms, we have left them as contributors have used them, thereby indicating their current diversity of usage.

References

Alter, Robert (1981) The Art of Biblical Narrative. Basic Books, New York.

Alter, Robert, and Kermode, Frank (1987) The Literary Guide to the Bible. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Barratt, David, Pooley, Roger, and Ryken, Leland, eds (1995) The Discerning Reader: Christian Perspectives on Literature and Theory. Apollos, Leicester.

Bates, Ernest Sutherland, ed. (1933) The Bible Designed to Be Read as Literature. Heinemann, London.

Cavill, Paul, and Ward, Heather (2007) The Christian Tradition in English Literature: Poetry, Plays, and Shorter Prose. Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, MI.

Dinsmore, Charles Allen, ed. (1931) The English Bible as Literature. George Allen & Unwin, London.

Fish, Stanley (2005) “One University, Under God?” Chronicle of Higher Education January 7 (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i18/18c00101.htm). Accessed November 17, 2008.

Jasper, David, and Prickett, Stephen (1998) The Bible and Literature: A Reader. Blackwell, Oxford.

Jeffrey, David Lyle, ed. (1992) A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature. W. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI.

Kermode, Frank (1979) The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Charles Eliot Norton lectures. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Lewis, C. S. (1996) “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. W. B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI.

Masuzawa, Tomoko (2005) The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Norton, David (2000) A History of the English Bible as Literature. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Pearce, Joseph (1998) Tolkien: Man and Myth. Harper Collins, London.

Roston, Murray (1965) Prophet and Poet. The Bible and the Growth of Romanticism. Faber & Faber, London.

CHAPTER 2

The Literature of the Bible

Christopher Rowland

What Is the Bible?

In November 2003 Chief Justice Roy Moore was removed from office for refusing to remove a two-ton granite monument of the Ten Commandments from the Alabama Supreme Court building, after the monument had been ruled an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.1 The event is a reminder that these verses from Exodus 20 are embedded in the popular psyche as epitomizing what the Bible teaches. The Bible is often seen as a book of moral instruction or a relic of a previous age, and also as a forbidding reminder of a more puritanical environment from which a modern age is glad to be free. Many would sympathize with William Blake’s protest against dominant models of eighteenth-century Christianity that appropriated the Bible as a moral, doctrinal rulebook, authoritatively sanctioning the kind of religion summarized in the Ten Commandments, which Blake characterizes by the words “Thou shalt not.” Yet the Ten Commandments are only one fragment of an enormously diverse book: open the Bible at random, and you may find a legal code, but you are equally likely to turn up a genealogy, or a long account of the doing of the kings of Judah in the Old Testament, or a set of complex arguments about the Jewish law and justification by faith in some New Testament epistle. Even a Gospel like that of John portrays a rather elusive and eccentric Jesus whose words are often opaque. While the Bible can be (as Moore would like it to be) a stern arbiter of morality, it is simultaneously full of sexual scandal and violence on the grand scale.

The complexity of the Bible is belied by its very name: the Bible. The definite article gives the impression – confirmed by two thousand years of two major-faith traditions endorsing the view – that the Bible is a single book rather than a motley collection made up (depending on your tradition) of fifty-six works in the (Christian) Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New Testament. To describe it in this way is to point to its highly heterogeneous composition, composed of, among other things, narrative, poetry, prophecy, law, and personal communication. The heterogeneous has only come to appear homogeneous due to the religious communities that have asserted that its contents represent the Word of God. The logic of the argument is that there is a unique divine mind behind the various parts of the Bible, and it is therefore the responsibility of frail human minds to discern the unified mind of God behind these diverse texts. There is no doubt about the ingenuity that has existed (and still exists) to discern the unity of the Bible, and many sharp interpreters have set themselves to find that coherence. The result is that this collection has become special not as books but as THE Book to be set part from others and regarded with reverence as a collection of words which not only cohere, but despite their ordinariness, are also somehow imbued with a holy quality. Hence the Holy Bible – it is a book set apart.