Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible

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.