The Poetics of Prophecy: Modern Afterlives of a Biblical Tradition - Softcover

Raz, Yosefa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1009366297 ISBN 13: 9781009366298

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009366297
• ISBN 13: 9781009366298
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 230