The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature

by Lemon, Rebecca; Mason, Emma; Roberts, Jonathan; Rowland, Christopher

• ISBN13: 9781405131605
• ISBN10: 1405131608
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-04-27
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

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 role and influence on English literature - as arguably the most powerful work of literature in history - from the medieval period up through the 20th 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

Author Biography

Rebecca Lemon is an associate professor of English literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare's England (2006), as well as articles on Mary Wroth and Petrarchism, Shakespeare and Agamben, and Hayward and censorship.

Emma Mason is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Women Poet's of the Nineteenth Century (2006), Nineteenth Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (with Mark Knight, 2006), and The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (2009).

Jonathan Roberts is a lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of William Blake’s Poetry (2007), The Bible for Sinners (with Christopher Rowland, 2008), the forthcoming Blake. Wordsworth. Religion. (2009) and is co-editing the forthcoming Oxford Companion to the Reception History of the Bible (2010).

Christopher Rowland is Dean Ireland’s Professor of Holy Exegesis at the University of Oxford. He has written on radical Christian writings including those of Gerrard Winstanley and William Blake and the Bible. He is the author of a number of books, including The Nature of New Testament Theology (2006), Revelation Through the Centuries (with Judith Kovacs, 2003), and Radical Christian Writings: A Reader (with Andrew Bradstock, 2002), all published by Wiley-Blackwell. Together with John Sawyer and Judith Kovacs he also edits the Blackwell Bible Commentary series.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors

Introduction

Editors' Introduction

The Literature of the Bible

Biblical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory

Medieval

Medieval Literature

The Bible in Old English Poetry

The Medieval Religious Lyric

The Middle English Mystics

The Pearl-Poet

The Bible in William Langland's Piers the Plowman

Chaucer and the Bible

Early Modern

The Bible in Early Modern Literature: Introduction

Early Modern Women and the Bible

Early Modern Religious Prose

Spenser and the Bible

The Countess of Pembroke and the Book of Psalms

Shakespeare and the Bible

Donne and the Bible

George Herbert and the Bible

John Milton

Bunyan and the Bible

John Dryden

Eighteenth Century and Romantic

The Bible in the Eighteenth Century

Eighteenth-Century Hymn Writers

Daniel Defoe

Swift and The Bible

William Blake and the Bible

Women Romantic Poets and the Bible

Wordsworth and the Bible

Coleridge and the Bible

Jane Austen and the Bible

Byron and the Bible

Shelley and the Bible

Victorian

The Victorian Period

The Brownings and the Bible

Tennyson and the Bible

The Brontds and the Bible

Ruskin and the Bible

George Eliot and the Bible

Christina Rossetti and the Bible

Hopkins and the Bible

Sensation Fiction and the Bible

Decadence and the Bible

Modernism&

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