Origins of Narrative The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible [Paperback]

An examination of the rise in prestige of the Bible as a literary and aesthetic model during the late eighteenth century.During the later 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 historical criticism suggested that the Bible's text was neither stable nor original, the new notion of the Bible as a cultural artefact became a paradigm of all literature. Not merely was English, German and French Romanticism steeped in Biblical references of a new kind, but theories of literature and criticism came to be biblically derived.During the later 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 historical criticism suggested that the Bible's text was neither stable nor original, the new notion of the Bible as a cultural artefact became a paradigm of all literature. Not merely was English, German and French Romanticism steeped in Biblical references of a new kind, but theories of literature and criticism came to be biblically derived.During the later 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 historical criticism suggested that the Bible's text was neither stable nor original, the new notion of the Bible as a cultural artifact became a paradigm of all literature. Not merely was English, German and French Romanticism steeped in Biblical references of a new kind, but theories of literature and criticism came to be Biblically derived.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 sellsj