Feminist Revision and the Bible - (Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory) Annotated by Alicia Suskin Ostriker (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

What happens when women writers re-imagine culture? How do feminists need that ur-text of patriarchy, the Bible? Unwritten volume: Re-thinking teh Bible attempts to re-think certain customary assumptions about feminism and about the Bible, in the light of poetic "readings" of biblical texts by 19th and 20th century women writers. The author proposes that women writers relate to the Bible in complex ways, which both critique biblical misogyny and stem directly from elements of transgressive writing within scripture iteself. Ultimately Ostriker suggests that feminist reinterpretations of scripture are the inevitable consequence of spiritual values which ask us to turn from institutions to the meaning of the original revelation.

From the Back Cover

What happens when women writers imagine culture? What is the relation of the feminist writer to the male tradition? Feminist Revision and the Bible extends the feminist examination of western literature to the founding document of patriarchal culture, the Bible. At the same time, it re-thinks certain customary assumptions about feminism and about the Bible, in the light of poetic 'readings' of biblical texts by 19th and 20th century women writers.

Modern biblical criticism recognizes that scripture has at no moment in history been a unified monolithic text, has always been radically composite, plurally authored, multiply motivated. But these insights have not been applied to issues of gender. Mainstream feminist theory, on the other hand, with few exceptions tends to treat patriarchal texts as uniformly antagonistic to women and femaleness. Feminist Revision and the Bible proposes that women writers relate to the Bible in complex ways which both critique biblical misogyny and stem directly from elements of transgressive writing within the biblical text, suggesting that feminist reinterpretations of the Bible constitute an inevitable consequence of radical spiritual values at the core of scripture itself.

Review Quotes

" Highly Recommended". Cross Currents

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

About the Author

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.