Our first paper by Denae Dyck investigates the historical influence of this scholarship on English literature as it began to be translated into English in the nineteenth century. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Eliot offer effective case studies because they engaged with the higher criticism not only as commentators (Coleridge’s Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, posthumously published in 1840) or translators (Eliot’s versions of David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu in 1846 and Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wessen Des Christentums in 1854) but also as practitioners: their creative works reinterpret biblical texts in ways that draw on this criticism’s findings and methods. The responses to the higher criticism from nineteenth-century British writers show substantial points of intersection between historical and literary approaches to the Bible. In particular, these approaches converge in the project of re-reading the Bible as a fragmentary and polyphonic text, a project that continues to inform biblical scholarship and literary studies today. Dyck’s analysis of Coleridge and Eliot explicates the dynamic frameworks of revelation and authority that they formulated in response to the higher criticism and, in turn, situates these frameworks in relation to the work of Paul Ricoeur in our own time. Taken together, Coleridge, Eliot, and Ricoeur indicate that historical-critical Bible scholarship’s capacity to catalyze dialogue within and across religious expressions has much to offer literary studies.
Our second paper by Barry Hudek uses historical-critical scholarship on the book of Daniel as a method of shedding light on an allusion to the “fiery furnace” in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner describes the main character, Thomas Sutpen (the aspiring planter trying to forge a dynasty in Mississippi), as if he underwent a “solitary furnace experience,” an allusion to Daniel 3. By tracing historical-critical scholarship on Daniel by Daniel Smith-Christopher and Walter Brueggemann, and the popular understanding of the “fiery trial” in the U.S. cultural imaginary, this paper shows the importance of that scholarship and biblical allusion more generally in Faulkner’s 1936 masterpiece. However, Faulkner inverts the scholarly and popular readings of Daniel as an anti-imperialist text, and the cultural idea that a person will prove stronger after their “fiery trial” to show that Sutpen’s own furnace experience has forged him as an imperialist instead. In critiquing U.S. imperialism in Haiti, Faulkner reveals the subaltern space of Daniel’s furnace as the crucible of imperialist undoing, an undoing the historical-critical method helps reveal, as a space where the contradictions of imperialism emerge in full view.
Our third paper by Christopher Douglas likewise uses the method of historical-critical scholarship to examine the unexpected return of ancient Israelite polytheism in contemporary white evangelical fiction. Over the last 30 years, scholars such as Mark Smith and Daniel Boyarin have uncovered the ways in which the Bible exhibits textual traces of the pantheon of gods that ancient Israel is now believed to have had. Coupled with additional archeological and inscriptional evidence, this work suggests that later Yahweh-alone redactors worked to (mostly) edit the Biblical text toward monotheism, but that traces of polytheism (as in Daniel’s Ancient of Days / “Son of Man”) imagery eventually gave rise to the first two persons in the Christian Trinity. Touching on popular evangelical fiction such as William Paul Young’s The Shack and Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness, Douglas argues that these two writers have inadvertently discovered the advantages of Ancient Near East polytheism for the simple reason that many gods make answering the problem of evil much easier than remaining within the framework of a single, benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient deity.
Our fourth paper by Matthew Mullins focuses on the subject and method of historical-critical scholarship for literary studies to offer a counterpoint to the above papers. Literary critics often proclaim their love of literature, Mullins claims, yet our literary-critical methods are overwhelmingly suspicious. When the critic’s method is to tell her audience what the text really says, her default attitude is suspicious. As Eve Sedgwick and Rita Felski have argued, this suspicion has become the horizon of literary hermeneutics. But why are we drawn to suspicion over love? The answer, in part, is that we have come to think of the knowledge that accompanies suspicion as more rigorous and valuable than the knowledge that accompanies love. Suspicion subjugates the text to the critic’s control and defies naiveté. It also fosters critical thinking, the last vestige of value literary criticism offers a world consumed by the totalizing logic of the marketplace. Mullins argues that the tradition of historical-critical scholarship offers a model in its negotiation of the tension between historical and devotional reading. Drawing on Rudolf Bultmann’s historical-critical demythologization of the New Testament, Mullins contends that suspicion and love can enable one another. Literary criticism grounded in suspicion alone is set on making a case, on closing down interpretive possibilities, ironically attempting to avoid further suspicion. A more robust criticism draws on both, knowing that suspicion needs love just as doubt requires faith.