Words And The Word: Language Poetics, And Biblical Interpretation; Author: Prickett, Stephen; Paperback

Author: Prickett, Stephen
Paperback; Notes, Bibliography, Index
320 pages
Published: August 1988
Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521368383

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 Dennisand 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.The relationship between religion and poetics is pursued, particularly the nature of religious language, and the hermeneutic, epistemological and linguistic theories of biblical interpretation. The book won the 1987 MLA Conference on Christianity and Literature Prize.