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For more than four decades, David Lyle Jeffrey has enriched the world of Christian scholarship. Throughout his work, Jeffrey has drawn attention to the ways in which imaginative engagements with biblical texts have been central to major shifts in Christian and post-Christian hermeneutics, ethics, and aesthetics. The purpose of this volume is to challenge and deepen that growing discourse by showing how English literature across varied traditions unfolds a central Christian interaction between divine Incarnation, invented narrative, and ethical praxis. In their essays, the authors demonstrate how an imaginative engagement with biblical narratives, in historical or contemporary writing, continues to provide a fruitful means to address the intellectual and ethical antinomies of the postmodern scene.
The articles in this collection form two groups: the first set of essays focuses on specific episodes or moments of historical change within European biblical literary traditions; the second group focuses on the dissemination of biblical literary engagements in areas outside of European contexts, ranging from North America to South Africa to China. Unique in the wide range of topics it covers—itself a reflection of Jeffrey’s own broad scope of scholarship—the collection functions as a working example of Jeffrey’s thesis that the biblical tradition has a far-reaching influence on the development of Western literature, even by those who are reluctant to acknowledge its present influence.
“This volume honoring Jeffrey on the occasion of his seventieth birthday is concerned with ongoing historical changes in the interpretive reception of biblical texts.” —New Testament Abstracts
"As D. H. Williams and Phillip J. Donnelly note in the introduction, David Jeffrey is a brilliant polymath with extraordinary erudition. The impressiveness of his scholarly work is outstripped only by his personal qualities as a beloved teacher and mentor to many. This festschrift volume is an appealingly wide-ranging interdisciplinary tribute to David Jeffrey on the topic that integrates his remarkable career: the interpretive reception and literary transformations of biblical texts and tropes in the Western Christian cultural imagination. I heartily recommend this superb book to anyone interested in the interrelations between the Bible, theology, ethics, and literature." —Travis Kroeker, McMaster University
"David Lyle Jeffrey is a scholar of extraordinary depth and extraordinary breadth. The essays gathered in this collection in his honor do, indeed, pay tribute to his lasting contributions to disparate fields as well as provide further scholarship in areas of significance to him." —Alan Jacobs, Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Honors Program, Baylor University
“The breadth and depth of David Lyle Jeffrey’s work and its consistent engagement with scripture recall that of Erich Auerbach. These essays not only acknowledge and clarify Jeffrey’s achievement but also extend it in their attention to literary, philosophical, and religious works of the West. Given Jeffrey’s trailblazing work, it is especially fitting that the final essays turn to Africa and China. In this way, this excellent volume illumines both past and future. Highly relevant, warmly recommended." —Paul J. Contino, Blanche E. Seaver Professor of Humanities, Pepperdine University
Phillip J. Donnelly is director and associate professor of literature in the Great Texts Program at Baylor University.
D. H. Williams is professor of religion in patristics and historical theology at Baylor University.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. European Biblical Cultures: Interventions in Traditions
1. Latin Pedagogy and Ethical Ends in the “Royal Grammar” (1542) by Phillip J. Donnelly
2. “Propter nos” and Paradise Lost: Reading and Inhabiting “This Pendent World” by Dennis Danielson
3. Books and Their Readers: Visual Storytelling in the Copenhagen Ovide moralisé by K. Sarah-Jane Murray and Tyler F. Walton .
4. Backing into the Future: Romanticism, Secularization, and the Reinvention of Literature by Stephen Prickett
5. Did Napoleon Exist? An Episode in the Hist by John V. Fleming
6. The Nouvelle Humanism of Henri de Lubac and G. K. Chesterton by Ralph C. Wood
7. “A Brother Helped by a Brother”: Friendship and the City in the Fiction of the Inklings by Dominic Manganiello
Part 2. Dissemination of Biblical Traditions: West and East
8. Revelation of the Word: “What’s at Stake” in the Study of the Bible and English Literature by Gregory Maillet
9. The Bible in Canada and the United States by Mark A. Noll
10. Samson and Self-Destroying Evil by Eleonore Stump
11. Medieval Biblical Drama in Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Chester Plays in Afterlife by Theresa Coletti
12. Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature and Religion in China by Yang Huilin
13. Friend and Guide: Professor David L. Jeffrey and China by Liu Yi-Qing
Bibliography of David Lyle Jeffrey’s Published Works
List of Contributors
Index