Origins of Narrative
The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible

An examination of the rise in prestige of the Bible as a literary and aesthetic model during the late eighteenth century.

Stephen Prickett (Author)

9780521445436, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 March 1996

308 pages, 1 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.62 kg

'There is much here of scholarly brilliance … this latest work by an extremely distinguished scholar throws down an intellectual challenge to many cherished assumptions, and offers a new way of viewing the shifting patterns of cultural change from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.' British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies

During the late eighteenth century the Bible underwent a shift in interpretation so radical as to make it virtually a different book from what it had been a hundred years earlier. Even as its text was being revealed as neither stable nor original, the new notion of the Bible as a cultural artefact became a paradigm for all literature. In Origins of Narrative one of the world's leading scholars in biblical interpretation, criticism and theory describes how, while formal religion declined, the prestige of the Bible as a literary and aesthetic model rose to new heights: not merely was English, German and French Romanticism steeped in biblical references of a new kind, but hermeneutics and, increasingly, theories of literature and criticism were biblically derived. Professor Prickett reveals how the Romantic Bible became simultaneously a novel-like narrative work, an on-going site of re-interpretation, and an all-embracing literary form giving meaning to all other writing.

Part I. Jacob's Blessing: 1. The stolen birthright
2. The presence of the past
Part II. The Romantic Bible: 3. The Bible as novel
4. The Bible and history: appropriating the Revolution
5. The Bible as metatype: Jacob's ladder
6. Hermeneutic and narrative: the story of self-consciousness
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]