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COPYRIGHT 2001 Boston University
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999. Pp. 158.
Published as a volume in "Perspectives in Romanticism," a series that seeks to place romanticism in a "comparative and interdisciplinary perspective," David Jasper's study examines the contribution of the British and German romantics to the changing authority of the Bible from a theological point of view. Although his work overlaps somewhat with the literary studies of M. H. Abrams, E. S. Shaffer, Hans Frei and Stephen Prickett, Jasper's project is intended to complicate previous thinking about the interactions among the romantic writers, the Bible, and emerging biblical criticism. Jasper also has a larger agenda in that he is finally claiming that, from a theological perspective, the work of the romantics has more to say to the postmodern moment than has previously been assumed.
Jasper's first two chapters set up his main point: that even as the work of biblical scholars and critics in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was threatening to erode the canonicity of the sacred books, the writers and artists of the period were re-inscribing those books within a new, more universal and secularized canon. To put it another way, the original authority of the Bible, derived from the Church and religious tradition, gave way to a different kind of authority, which in turn re-defined European ideas of religion and spirituality. While biblical critics and scholars like Anthony Collins and Johann Semler--and the Higher Critics who came later--were disrupting the traditional unity of the Bible,...
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