Smp (Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture) - Hardcover

...a powerful book, one that takes the debate about midrash and literature significantly further forward. Theoretically sophisticated but undogmatic, scholarly and original...he provides a tremendous example of how exciting and provocative inter-disciplinary work can be without sacrificing any of the traditional scholarly virtues of accuracy and precision. "Religion and the Arts" ...testifies to its author's range, deftness, and subtlety."-Congress Monthly, Haim Chertok"

Harold Fisch explores the biblical influence on the style and the structure of landmark novels by Fielding, Defoe, Gearge Eliot, Kafka, Dostoevsky and others. These turn out, again and again, to be re-readings of biblical stories. This echoing is sometimes explicit as in Joseph Andrews, where Fielding offers us a comic revision of the career of the biblical Joseph. But it can be inexplicit and even unconscious as in Kafka's The Trial, which, without mentioning Job, reads (as Northop Frye has noted) like a midrashic commentary on that book. In a study remarkable for its range and subtlety, the author develops the notion of the novel as midrash but argues that while the great novelists were held in thrall by the biblical patterns and stories, they were also regularly compelled to throw off this thraldom. They could not manage without the Bible but at the same time it would not do. Fisch discusses the adversial realation to the biblical text with reference to two archetypal narratives: the Job story and the Dinding of Isaac. Of particluar interest are the chapters devoted to the Israeli novelist S.Y. Agnon and A.B. Yehoshua.