Feminist Revision and the Bible: The Unwritten Volume

What happens when women writers imagine culture? What is therelation of the feminist writer to the male tradition? FeministRevision and the Bible extends the feminist examination ofwestern literature to the founding document of patriarchal culture,the Bible. At the same time, it re–thinks certain customaryassumptions about feminism and about the Bible, in the light ofpoetic ′readings′ of biblical texts by 19th and 20th century womenwriters.

Modern biblical criticism recognizes that scripture has at nomoment in history been a unified monolithic text, has always beenradically composite, plurally authored, multiply motivated. Butthese insights have not been applied to issues of gender.Mainstream feminist theory, on the other hand, with few exceptionstends to treat patriarchal texts as uniformly antagonistic to womenand femaleness. Feminist Revision and the Bible proposesthat women writers relate to the Bible in complex ways which bothcritique biblical misogyny and stem directly from elements oftransgressive writing within the biblical text, suggesting thatfeminist reinterpretations of the Bible constitute an inevitableconsequence of radical spiritual values at the core of scriptureitself.

Introduction.

1. Out of My Sight.

2. A Word made Flesh.

3. The Lilith Poems.

4. An Interview with Alicia Ostriker.

Bibliography.

Index.

Alicia Ostriker is the author of seven volumes of poetry, as well as Vision and Verse in William Blake and an annotated edition of Blake′s Complete Poems. Her work as a feminist critic includes Writing like a Woman and the widely influential and controversial Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women′s Poetry in America.

" Highly Recommended". Cross Currents

"An essentially optimistic, as well as delightfullyiconoclastic, reading of scripture." Church Times