Words and The Word Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation [Paperback]

Attempts to chart the eighteenth-century schism between biblical hermeneutics and literary criticism, a split with profound implications for twentieth-century biblical translation and literary theory.Attempts to chart the eighteenth-century schism between biblical hermeneutics and literary criticism, a split with profound implications for twentieth-century biblical translation and literary theory.Prickett charts the schism, opened at the end of the oighteenth century, between biblical hermeneutics and literary criticism. This split has profound implications for both contemporary biblical translation and literary theory. The author investigates the critical commonplace that religious language is essentially poetic, and traces the development of that view in the writings of Dennis and Vico, Herder and Eichhorn, Ccoleridge and Arnold, Wordsworth and Hopkins, and Austin Farrer and Paul Ricouer. This concept continues to provide a terminology for discussing narrative that can no longer be interpreted literally or allegorically, but has also led some critics to devise inadequate translation theories and conceptions of metaphor.Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Ways of reading the Bible; 2. 'The peculiar language of heaven &': the religious and the poetic 'primal consciousness' and linguistic change; 3. Poetry and prophecy; 4. The paradoxes of disconfirmation; 5. Metaphor and reality; Notes; Bibliography; Index. ...indispensable for anyone who would understand the verbal situation today. The Christian Science Monitor