Old Testament Women in Western Literature

The eleven essays in OLD TESTAMENT WOMEN study the ways in which biblical narratives about women have been used as pre-texts--that is, both as earlier texts & as the occasion for moralistic views of women in later literature--showing that both the biblical narratives themselves & the writers of later eras who used biblical themes (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Sterne, & Margaret Laurence, among others) were guided by a more complex & subtle understanding of female identity & reality than the patriarchal traditions that formed the cultural contexts in which the biblical texts were first compiled & read. This book will be of particular interest to students of literature, the Bible as literature, & women's studies. Contents: Angel Narrators & Biblical Women; The Gnostic Eve; Rachel & Leah in Dante's Purgatorio; Job's Wife, Walter's Wife, & the Wife of Bath; DeBartas' La Judit; Jephthah's Daughter; The Parts Ophelia Plays; Milton & the Concubine of Judges; Dinah & the Comedy of Castration in TRISTRAM SHANDY; Ruth: From Harvester to Fallen Woman in Nineteenth-Century England; Victorian American Readings of Old Testament Heroines; Margaret Laurence's Hagar.Frontain, Raymond-Jean is the author of 'Old Testament Women in Western Literature' with ISBN 9780944436127 and ISBN 0944436129.