Harold Fisch explores the biblical influence on the style and structure of landmark works by Fielding, Defoe, George Eliot, Kafka, Dostoevsky and others. Whilst the great novelists could not manage without the Bible, at the same time 'it would not do'. The book concludes with two chapters on the Israeli novelists S.Y. Agnon and A.B. Yehoshua.

Autorentext

HAROLD FISCH, now Professor Emeritus in English Literature at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, was rector of that university from 1968-1971. A graduate of Sheffield and Oxford, he has taught at Leeds University and has been a guest lecturer at Brown, Yale, Maryland and elsewhere. He is well-known as a scholar and critic with an equal mastery of English literature and Hebrew and biblical studies. Among his publications are: Jerusalem and Albion: the Hebraic Factor in Seventeenth Century Literature*, Hamlet and the Word: the Covenant Pattern in Shakespeare*, A Remembered Future: a Study in Literary Mythology, and Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation.

Zusammenfassung
Professor Harold Fisch breaks new ground in his present work by exploring the relation between the novel and the biblical writings as a continuing dialogue. The landmark novels of the West turn out, again and again, to be re-readings of biblical stories. This echoing is sometimes explicit as in Joseph Andrews, where Fielding offers us a comic revision of the career of the biblical Joseph. But it can be inexplicit and even unconscious as in Kafka's The Trial, which, without mentioning Job, reads (as Northop Frye has noted) like a midrashic commentary on that book.In a study remarkable both for its range and depth, Harold Fisch develops the notion of the novel as midrash but argues that whilst the great novelists were held in thrall by the biblical patterns and stories, they were also regularly compelled to throw off this thraldom. They could not manage without the Bible but at the same time `it would not do'. Theirs was an adversarial relation to the biblical text. Fisch discusses this dialectic with reference to two archetypal narratives: the Job story and the Binding of Isaac. Of particular interest are the chapters devoted to the Israeli novelists SY Agnon and AB Yehoshua. Whilst, as might be expected, they are drawn with special force to the Biblical word, their resistance to its fascination is in some ways greater than that of writers in the West.

Inhalt

Preface PART ONE: INTRODUCTORY Dialogue and Repetition PART TWO: BIBLICAL REALISM AND THE ENGLISH NOVEL Robinson's Biblical Island 'Imitation' in Joseph Andrews Natural Piety in Silas Marner PART THREE: JOB IN MODERN FICTION Kafka's Debate with Job Being Possessed by Job Biblical Patterns for Sale: The Fixer PART FOUR: ISAAC UNBOUND Saul Bellow and Philip Roth The Akedah in A.B. Yehoshua The Day before Yesterday Index