Words and The Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation

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Cambridge University Press, 1986 - Literary Criticism - 305 pages
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.

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Contents

Ways of reading the Bible
4
The peculiar language of heaven
37
Primal Consciousness and linguistic change
68
Poetry and prophecy
95
The Book of Nature
123
The paradoxes of disconfirmation
149
The shaking of the foundations
174
Metaphor and reality
196
Notes
243
Bibliography
283
Index
297
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