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Since the mid-1700s, poets and scholars have been deeply entangled in the project of reinventing prophecy. Moving between literary and biblical studies, this book reveals how Romantic poetry is linked to modern biblical scholarship's development. On the one hand, scholars, intellectuals, and artists discovered models of strong prophecy in biblical texts, shoring up aesthetic and nationalist ideals, while on the other, poets drew upon a counter-tradition of destabilizing, indeterminate, weak prophetic power. Yosefa Raz considers British and German Romanticism alongside their margins, incorporating Hebrew literature written at the turn of the twentieth century in the Russia Empire. Ultimately she explains the weakness of modern poet-prophets not only as a crisis of secularism but also, strikingly, as part of the instability of the biblical text itself. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
List of contents
Introduction: Prophetic Strength and Weakness; 1. Seraphic Choirs and Stuttering Prophets: Symmetry, Disorder, and the Invention of the Literary Bible; 2. Walking through William Blake's Irregular Bible; 3. The Myth of Primordial Orality and the Disfigured Face of Written Prophecy; 4. Ahad Ha'am's Mask of Moses and the Secularization of Prophetic Power; 5. Haim Nahman Bialik: The National Poet's Cup of Sorrows; Afterword: An Untuning.
About the author
Yosefa Raz is teaches in the department of English Literature at the University of Haifa, where she specializes the study of the Bible and its reception, poetry and poetics, and Romantic and contemporary poetry. She is also a poet and translator, with work recently published in The Brooklyn Rail, Boston Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
