Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - The Dynamics of Parallelism
Chapter 2 - From Line to Story
Chapter 3 - Structures of Intensification
Chapter 4 - Truth and Poetry in the Book of Job
Chapter 5 - Forms of Faith in Psalms
Chapter 6 - Prophecy and Poetry
Chapter 8 - The Garden of Metaphor
Chapter 9 - The Life of the Tradition
BOOKS BY ROBERT ALTER
Rogue’s Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel Fielding and the Nature of the Novel After the Tradition Modern Hebrew Literature Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre Defenses of the Imagination A Lion for Love: A Critical Biography of Stendhal The Art of Biblical Narrative Motives for Fiction The Invention of Hebrew Prose The Literary Guide to the Bible (co-editor, with Frank Kermode) The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age Necessary Angels The World of Biblical Literature Hebrew and Modernity Genesis: A Translation with Commentary The David Story: A Translation with Commentary Canon and Creativity The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary Imagined Cities The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary Pen of Iron The Wisdom Books: A Translation with Commentary
For Carol
‘ayelet ‘ahavim veya’alat ḥen
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION
Rereading this book carefully sentence by sentence after the passage of twenty-five years, I was pleasantly surprised to discover how well it held together. Though before 1985 I had occasionally written an article on poetry (modern rather than ancient), this was my first book devoted to poetry, and I myself might have expected some telltale signs of a critic venturing beyond his familiar territory of narrative and the novel. In retrospect, I think several elements in my own literary formation came together in the critical synthesis of this book—my reading of the American New Critics as an undergraduate, my later acquaintance with Russian Formalism and with the Soviet semiotic theorists of poetry, a splendid course with Reuben Brower at Harvard on English Augustan poetry that made me appreciate the wit and subtlety of the heroic couplet and so better understand how poetry worked in Proverbs, and a passionate attachment since adolescence to the Hebrew of these biblical poems, their powerful rhythms pulsating within me and impelling me to strive for a better account of their poetic power than the ones in circulation.
The Art of Biblical Poetry has continued to be used as a classroom text and to reach general readers, but it is my impression that it has had less of an impact on the academic field of biblical studies than my book on biblical narrative. Because poetry is an intricate formal system that often involves minute linguistic maneuvers, the analysis here is in some ways more intricate than that in The Art of Biblical Narrative, though I did my best to frame it in terms ...
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About The Art of Biblical PoetryThree decades ago, renowned literary expert Robert Alter radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as not only a human creation but a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. In The Art of Biblical Poetry, his companion to the seminal The Art of Biblical Narrative, Alter takes his analysis beyond narrative craft to investigate the use of Hebrew poetry in the Bible. Updated with a new preface, myriad revisions, and passages from Alter's own critically acclaimed biblical translations, The Art of Biblical Poetry is an indispensable tool for understanding the Bible and its poetry. |
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