The Bible and Literature: A Reader

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Summary: The Bible and Literature
Review: The target audience is teachers of English who have grown up without the basic Bible knowledge expected of every educated person a couple of generations ago. A secondary market must be biblical scholars and teachers who suffer similar deficiencies when it come to English literature.

Familiar Bible passages and relevant extracts from English literature therefore find themselves side by side without any attempt to relate the one to the other, thus providing a resource of considerable value to both parties. In each case we have a few pages of commentary on the biblical passages with a brief explanation as to why each of the liteary passages was chosen, followed by a selection of literary material without commentary. Literary sources include Milton, Chaucer, Augustine, Kirkegaard, T S Eliot, D H Lawrence, C S Lewis, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Bunyanm, Dryden, Shakespeare, Umberto Eco, Oscar Wilde, Shaw, Wordsworth, James Joyce and Derrida.

Two meanings of the Bible in literature are differentiated: the one which treats the Bible simply as a collection of secular writings and the other which sees a literary understanding of the Bible not as a subsititute for its religious content but as an adjunct to it.