The Book and the Text: Bible and Literary Theory by Regina M. Schwartz

How does today's literary theory reshape our reading of the Bible? For too long, attention to the Bible "as literature" has meant focusing on traditional aspects of plot, characterization and imagery. In this volume, literary and cultural critics bring theoretical reflection to the Bible, illuminating it in ways that are surprising - if not always comfortable. They address such topics how the narrative offers a subtle challenge to the cominant patriarchal structure in the book of Judges, how the survival and loss of texts in the Hebrew Bible is implicated in patterns of repression and remembering, how the context of popular culture in the ancient Greek develops genre expectations for the gospel of Mark and how Paul negotiates the conflicts between social identity and baptismal identity. This collection of essays engages the Bible with a broad range of theoretical perspectives; feminism, Marxism, psychoanalytic criticism, deconstruction, anthropological criticism, poetics, historicism and hermeneutics.