A History of the English Bible as Literature

This book, first published in 2000, explores 500 years of religious and literary ideas contained in the King James Bible.

David Norton (Author)

9780521771405, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 June 2000

524 pages, 16 b/w illus.
23.6 x 16 x 3.2 cm, 0.83 kg

'The clarity and drive of Morton's writing happily matches the fulness of his material … he successfully challenges the now-fashionable dismissal of the English bible from history.' The Journal of Theological Studies

Revised and condensed from David Norton's acclaimed A History of the Bible as Literature, this book, first published in 2000, tells the story of English literary attitudes to the Bible. At first jeered at and mocked as English writing, then denigrated as having 'all the disadvantages of an old prose translation', the King James Bible somehow became 'unsurpassed in the entire range of literature'. How so startling a change happened and how it affected the making of modern translations such as the Revised Version and the New English Bible is at the heart of this exploration of a vast range of religious, literary and cultural ideas. Translators, writers such as Donne, Milton, Bunyan and the Romantics, reactionary Bishops and radical students all help to show the changes in religious ideas and in standards of language and literature that created our sense of the most important book in English.

1. Creators of English
2. From the Great Bible to the Rheims-Douai Bible: arguments about language
3. The King James Bible
4. Literary implications of Bible presentation
5. The struggle for acceptance
6. The Psalter in verse and poetry
7. The eloquentest book in the world'
8. Writers and the Bible 1: Milton and Bunyan
9. The early eighteenth century and the KJB
10. Mid-century
11. The critical rise of the KJB
12. Writers and the Bible 2: the Romantics
13. Literary discussion to mid-victorian times
14. The revised version
15. 'The Bible as literature'
16. The later reputation of the KJB
17. The New English Bible.

Subject Areas: Bibles [HRCF]