A Biblical Text and its Afterlives The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture [Hardcover]

This book is concerned with how interpretation re-shapes Bible texts, specifically examining the book of Jonah.This book is concerned with how interpretation re-shapes texts and will appeal to readers in Cultural Studies, Jewish Studies and Biblical Studies. It pursues the book of Jonah through sources as diverse as Moby Dick, medieval poetry, Jewish midrash, and sixteenth century Netherlandish art, and looks at how popular understandings of the book are on a collision course with academic/Christian understanding of the text. The theme is the resourcefulness of the Bible: it is not a static, homogenous object, but survives by re-forming itself, changing, and being stretched.This book is concerned with how interpretation re-shapes texts and will appeal to readers in Cultural Studies, Jewish Studies and Biblical Studies. It pursues the book of Jonah through sources as diverse as Moby Dick, medieval poetry, Jewish midrash, and sixteenth century Netherlandish art, and looks at how popular understandings of the book are on a collision course with academic/Christian understanding of the text. The theme is the resourcefulness of the Bible: it is not a static, homogenous object, but survives by re-forming itself, changing, and being stretched.This book charts the mutations of the book of Jonah as it latches onto Christian and Jewish motifs and anxieties, passes through highbrow and lowbrow culture, and finally becomes something of a scavenger among the ruins, as, in its most resourceful move to date, it begins to live off the demise of faith. This book is concerned with those versions of the biblical that escape proper disciplinary boundaries: it shifts the focus from Mainstream to Backwater interpretation. It is less a navigation of interpretative history and more an interrogation of larger political/cultural issues: anti-Judaism in Biblical Studies, the secularization of the Bible, and the projection of the Bible as credulous ingenu, naive Other to our savvy post-Enlilƒ/