Even at a time when secularism and world religions are more likely to provide the framework for literary work today than is Christianity and the Bible, and such a framework too for readers of literature, nonetheless the Bible has shaped the thinking of many writers of English literature over time. The scope of this companion is from the Old English and medieval right up to the “modernism” of Woolf and Lawrence and Yeats and T.S. Eliot. The companion ends with an essay on the poets of World War I, and this is the conclusion to a work that works its way chronologically through the early modern and the Victorian to the early decades of the twentieth century.
The main audience (says the general introduction) is expected to be students of literature, especially the “canonical” authors for students on undergraduate programmes. The work focuses on British writers and those who have worked substantially in the British Isles. It is also offered as an aid to understanding the influence of the Bible on English literature, and so it usefully connects up with literature and theology, religion and literature, and the Bible as literature. Indeed, the emphasis on the text of the Bible, and the many way in which this text has been interpreted and misread, mediated and critiqued by mainstream (and some less so) writers is one of the drivers of the companion.
And so it comes as no surprise to find different strands and approaches represented here, within that broadly chronological structure. There are strong and incisive chapters on the influence of the Bible on the ideas and creativity of Donne and Bunyan and Milton, each one in its way bringing out how each interpreted Biblical ideas and themes in idiosyncratic ways, seeking to understand doctrine, working out the role of faith in a self‐fashioning creative development, using allegory and symbol, or mediating it for political and social reasons. Dryden's theology was also political. Swift's was satirical and Chaucer's ironic. For Blake institutional religion was hostile to both faith and the imagination. Wider cultural ideas, like the meeting of reason and faith during the Enlightenment and the supplanting of faith by the creative imagination by Romanticism, weave in and out.
The companion sets writers and genres (such as the medieval religious lyric, or early modern women writers, or sensation fiction) in context, and so we get such lyrics contrasted with the wider contemporary devotional literature, or what sensation fiction in the fiction of Collins and Braddon and others drew in terms of symbols, like fallen women and redemption). Early modern religious prose drew widely on Tyndale's version of the Bible and on paraphrases and on the Psalms. The Romantics knew their Bible (certainly Coleridge did) but reshaped notions of truth and nature to give us their distinct sensibility. Robert Browning's dramatic monologues refracted faith though the musings of eccentric characterization, Spenser filtered Biblical materials in allegorical and sometimes esoteric ways, and the Brontës explored themes of love and revenge and forgiveness in order to suggest how such things came about from personal responsibility. The many contributors to this companion provide generous quotations from the texts of these writers to demonstrate their arguments.
The extent to which Biblical themes and events are mediated and reshaped by writers leads us to another feature of this work – the ways in which writers do not just draw on the Bible but actively deconstruct and reconstruct it, perhaps not in a post‐modern sense as we know today, but certainly in substantial ways important at the time. Donne's Devotions, for example, reveal not only deep engagement with themes and doctrines, but also a strong determination to fashion himself as a writer in a unique way. For the Pearl poet in medieval literature, the Vulgate version of the Bible is the starting point for a commentary for aristocratic readers. Coleridge insists on an intellectual reading of the Bible, Tennyson writes for both believers and non‐believers in an age shaken by the Higher Criticism and Darwin, Christina Rossetti feeds on Oxford Movement doubts about the traditional church, and Yeats draws as much on Christian imagery as on Rosicrucianism and Celtic mythology.
This process of mediation is central to understanding the writers and their use of the Bible. Equally relevant is the reception, contemporary and subsequent, to their work: how people read their work, how people read the Bible at the time. Essays on Langland and Chaucer are typical (and good). Many writers took mediation far further – Blake in his critique of conventional “Old Testament” tyranny, Swift and Byron in their satire, Shelley with his overt atheism, and George Eliot with her knowledge of Straus and Feuerbach coming through discussions in novels like Middlemarch. Reason meets faith is a persistent theme, and this emerges strongly in the work of Hardy and Clough, George Eliot and Arnold, Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. Unexpectedly Wilde draws deeply on Biblical imagery (notably in De Profundis). Hopkins celebrates God's creation, T.S. Eliot pursues his spiritual journey as much with the magi as through the waste land.
This is the mix of work readers will find in this companion. Each of the six chronological sections has a well‐informed introduction by the editors (three literature lecturers in the UK and USA, with Rowland a theologian) and these open up themes and approaches useful for anyone lecturing in the field. This Blackwell series of companions is well established and readers may wish to examine others such as The Bible and Culture (Sawyer, 2006) (RR 2007/115) and The Study of Religion (Segal, 2006) (RR 2007/260). Understandably, the late nineteenth century and material from the twentieth century offer what modern students will most easily recognise as “doubt” or “agnosticism” (i.e. where the Biblical ideas and texts are reshaped in radical ways). Probably what comes across most clearly is how, and that, many of the writers chose deliberately to draw on the Bible, and for students increasingly unfamiliar with the Bible, this approach challenges as well as informs.
By that token, for all the interest and strength of this work, it is frustrating to stop where it does and not move on into areas of literature (and English literature at that) where the text has been dismantled by new methodologies and ideologies. It would extend this review by another thousand words to go there but think of Becket and Greene, let alone Saramago and Camus, Kafka and Mann. A late essay on Joyce and Finnegan's Wake points the way to this territory, while comments on Eliot's Four Quartets hint at ways in which Biblical images and doctrines will be reshaped for a more secular age today into a mélange of syncretism, secularism, and consumerism. The work provides a wealth of further reading, its chapters overlap very little (greater editorial caution might have been shown with chapters 12 and 15 here), textual evidence is provided in abundance, and there is a helpful index. It costs a lot of money, but for a lot. Academic library shelves almost certainly.
