THE TIMES (THE SUNDAY TIMES)
February 9, 2011
LONDON -- The King James Bible is a book that attracts superlatives. To David Norton it is “the most important book in English religion and culture”, to Gordon Campbell “the most celebrated book in the English-speaking world” and “the most enduring embodiment of Scripture in the English language”. To Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett it is simply the Bible translation that defines Bible translations: “All other versions still exist, as it were, in its shadow. It has shaped, formed and moulded the language with which the others must speak”. Most of the essays in The King James Bible after 400 Years take a wider, less partial view of the KJB’s influence. Many of the essays focus on individual writers, from Milton and Bunyan to Jean Rhys and Toni Morrison, and show how their work exploits the familiarity of the KJB, not in unconscious echo but in what Michael Wheeler, in a fine essay on Ruskin, describes as a “complex art of allusion”. [link]
Friday, 25 February 2011
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