The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature

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

• ISBN13: 9780470674994
• ISBN10: 0470674997
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-04-30
• 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 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

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 Shakespeares 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 Poets of the Nineteenth Century (2006), Nineteenth Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (with mark Knight, 2006), and The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (2009), and is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (with Michael Lieb and Jonathan Roberts, 2010). Jonathan Roberts is a lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of William Blakes Poetry (2007), The Bible for Sinners (with Christopher Rowland, 2008), Blake. Wordsworth. Religion. (2010), and is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (with Michael Lieb and Emma Mason, 2010). Christopher Rowland, is Dean Irelands Professor of Holy Exegesis at the University of Oxford. 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. He is Consultant Editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (edited by Michael Lieb, Emma Mason, and Jonathan Roberts, 2010), and together with John Sawyer, Judith Kovacs, and David Gunn, he also edits the Blackwell Bible Commentary series.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
General Introduction	p. 3
The Literature of the Bible	p. 10
Biblical Hermeneutics and Literary Theory	p. 22
Medieval	p. 39
Introduction	p. 41
Old English Poetry	p. 61
The Medieval Religious Lyric	p. 76
The Middle English Mystics	p. 85
The Pearl-Poet	p. 100
William Langland	p. 116
Geoffrey Chaucer	p. 134
Early Modern	p. 153
Introduction	p. 155
Early Modern Women	p. 169
Early Modern Religious Prose	p. 184
Edmund Spenser	p. 197
Mary Sidney	p. 211
William Shakespeare	p. 225
John Donne	p. 239
George Herbert	p. 254
John Milton	p. 269
John Bunyan	p. 286
John Dryden	p. 297
Eighteenth Century and Romantic	p. 311
Introduction	p. 313
Eighteenth-Century Hymn Writers	p. 329
Daniel Defoe	p. 345
Jonathan Swift	p. 359
William Blake	p. 373
Women Romantic Poets	p. 383
William Wordsworth	p. 397
S.T. Coleridge	p. 413
Jane Austen	p. 425
George Gordon Byron	p. 438
P.B. Shelley	p. 451
Victorian	p. 463
Introduction	p. 465
The Brownings	p. 482
Alfred Tennyson	p. 496
The Brontës	p. 512
John Ruskin	p. 525
George Eliot	p. 536
Christina Rossetti	p. 551
G. M. Hopkins	p. 563
Sensation Fiction	p. 577
Decadence	p. 587
Modernist	p. 601
Introduction	p. 603
W.B. Yeats	p. 617
Virginia Woolf	p. 629
James Joyce	p. 642
D. H. Lawrence	p. 654
T.S. Eliot	p. 667
The Great War Poets	p. 681
Index	p. 696
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