The indebtedness of Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake to a common source, namely the Bible becomes a powerful tool for displaying three fundamentally different poetic options as well as three different ways of dealing with a conflict central to western culture. In this piercing study of the poetics of influence, Fisch gives detailed and original discussions of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, King Lear, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes, Blake's Milton, and Blake's illustrations to Job.

The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake: A Comparative Study

Literature & Fiction

Fisch, Harold

Dramas & Plays

Clarendon Press

Do Old Testament poetry and narrative, wisdom-writing and prophecy work on us in the same way as do nonbiblical literary texts? Competent readers over the centuries have arrived at conflicting answers to this question. Some (from Longinus on) have maintained that biblical books offer examples of supreme literary art; others have passionately rejected this approach, insisting that beauty and pleasure are not the Bible’s business.
Poetry with a Purpose argues that, paradoxically, both views are right. Biblical poetics is marked by an unusual tension between aesthetic and nonaesthetic (even anti-aesthetic) modes of discourse. To understand this dialectic is to understand something quite fundamental about biblical texts and, more particularly, about the nature of the contract that governs their reading. The text summons the reader to respond to a familiar form but at the same instant undermines that response, deconstructs that form. The book of Ester, for example, displays the conventions of the Persian epic tradition, but its style is subtly challenged by the text itself. Similarly, the book of Job might seem to conform to the classical concept of tragedy but ultimately presents a uniquely biblical version of the form. While the prophets use the language of myth, they will often explode or "demythologize" their own language, affirming purposed at variance with the world of myth.
Harold Fisch applies his remarkably fruitful thesis to a number of biblical texts and modes, among them biblical pastoral, the Song of Songs, Psalms, Hosea, and Ecclesiastes. Equally at home in biblical studies and in general literature and theory, the author has produced a highly original work of unusual range and scholarship.

Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature)

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Indiana University Press

Do Old Testament poetry and narrative, wisdom-writing and prophecy work on us in the same way as do nonbiblical literary texts? Competent readers over the centuries have arrived at conflicting answers to this question. Some (from Longinus on) have maintained that biblical books offer examples of supreme literary art; others have passionately rejected this approach, insisting that beauty and pleasure are not the Bible’s business.Poetry with a Purpose argues that, paradoxically, both views are right. Biblical poetics is marked by an unusual tension between aesthetic and nonaesthetic (even anti-aesthetic) modes of discourse. To understand this dialectic is to understand something quite fundamental about biblical texts and, more particularly, about the nature of the contract that governs their reading. The text summons the reader to respond to a familiar form but at the same instant undermines that response, deconstructs that form. The book of Ester, for example, displays the conventions of the Persian epic tradition, but its style is subtly challenged by the text itself. Similarly, the book of Job might seem to conform to the classical concept of tragedy but ultimately presents a uniquely biblical version of the form. While the prophets use the language of myth, they will often explode or "demythologize" their own language, affirming purposed at variance with the world of myth.Harold Fisch applies his remarkably fruitful thesis to a number of biblical texts and modes, among them biblical pastoral, the Song of Songs, Psalms, Hosea, and Ecclesiastes. Equally at home in biblical studies and in general literature and theory, the author has produced a highly original work of unusual range and scholarship.

Poetry With a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Indiana Studies in Biblical Literature)

Indiana Univ. Pr

The Zionist revolution: A new perspective

Weidenfeld and Nicolson

Harold Fisch explores the biblical influence on the style and the structure of landmark novels by Fielding, Defoe, Gearge Eliot, Kafka, Dostoevsky and others. These turn out, again and again, to be re-readings of biblical stories. This echoing is sometimes explicit as in Joseph Andrews, where Fielding offers us a comic revision of the career of the biblical Joseph. But it can be inexplicit and even unconscious as in Kafka's The Trial, which, without mentioning Job, reads (as Northop Frye has noted) like a midrashic commentary on that book. In a study remarkable for its range and subtlety, the author develops the notion of the novel as midrash but argues that while the great novelists were held in thrall by the biblical patterns and stories, they were also regularly compelled to throw off this thraldom. They could not manage without the Bible but at the same time "it would not do." Fisch discusses the adversial realation to the biblical text with reference to two archetypal narratives: the Job story and the Dinding of Isaac. Of particluar interest are the chapters devoted to the Israeli novelist S.Y. Agnon and A.B. Yehoshua.

New Stories for Old: Biblical Patterns in the Novel (Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture)

History & Criticism

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

The Zionist Revolution

History

World

St Martins Pr

Studies the novels and stories of the Galician-born, Nobel Prize-winning Israeli writer, examining the single mediating voice of his writings and individual major works

S.Y. Agnon

Biographies & Memoirs

UNKNO

Hamlet and the Word;: The covenant pattern in Shakespeare

Ungar

The Bible with Koren Hebrew text and a meticulous, facing English translation.

The Jerusalem Bible

Koren

The dual image: The figure of the Jew in English and American literature

World Jewish Congress (British Section)

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