Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Words of Power: Reading Shakespeare and the Bible

Words of Power: Reading Shakespeare and the Bible

Bloomfield, Jem

Paperback

Literary CriticismGeneral Christianity

ISBN10: 0718894138
ISBN13: 9780718894139
Publisher: Lutterworth Press
Published: May 26 2016
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.75
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
A study of two major icons of Anglophone culture - the Bible and Shakespeare - exploring the treatment of canonicity, interpretation and appropriation.

Shakespeare and the Bible are titans of English-speaking culture: their images are endlessly cited and recycled, and their language permeates everything from our public ceremonies to our private jokes. In Words of Power, Jem Bloomfield explores the cultural reverberations of these two collections of books, and how each era finds new meanings as they encounter works such as Hamlet or the Gospel of Mark.

Beginning with a shrewd examination of how we have codified and standardised their canons, deciding which books and which words are included in the official collections and which are excluded, Bloomfield charts the ways in which every generation grapples with these enigmatic and complex texts. He explores the way they are read and performed in public, the institutions that use their names to legitimise their own activities, and how the texts are quoted by politicians, lords and rappers. Words of Power throws modern ideas about Shakespeare and the Bible into sharp relief by contrasting them with those of our ancestors, showing how our engagements with these texts reveal as much about ourselves as their actual meanings.

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