Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible

During the late 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 its text was being revealed as neither stable nor original, the new notion of the Bible as a cultural artefact became a paradigm for all literature. In Origins of Narrative one of the world\'s leading scholars in biblical interpretation, criticism and theory describes how, while formal religion declined, the prestige of the Bible as a literary and aesthetic model rose to new heights: not merely was English, German and French Romanticism steeped in biblical references of a new kind, but hermeneutics and, increasingly, theories of literature and criticism were biblically derived. Professor Prickett reveals how the Romantic Bible became simultaneously a novel-like narrative work, an on-going site of re-interpretation, and an all-embracing literary form giving meaning to all other writing.

• Ground breaking study of late eighteenth-century shift in interpretation of the Bible • Illuminating discussion of the importance of the Bible to Romanticism • New work by eminent scholar in the field

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 self-consciousness; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

‘There is much here of scholarly brilliance … this latest work by an extremely distinguished scholar throws down an intellectual challenge to many cherished assumptions, and offers a new way of viewing the shifting patterns of cultural change from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.’ British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies