Retellings: The Bible in Literature, Music, Art and Film Date: 14 April 2011, 13:34
|
Editorial Preface The Bible has played an inspirational role in the literature, music and art of Western culture for centuries, and the various treatments the Bible has received in literature, music and the visual arts have, in turn, in?uenced the way the Bible is read. From its earliest beginnings, ?lm has entered the picture as another in?uential medium for bringing biblical stories and characters to life for millions of viewers, many of whom have little knowledge of the Bible itself. In recent years biblical scholars and students have become increasingly interested in studying retellings of biblical stories in the arts, not only for their relation to the biblical text but also for the ‘story’ they have to tell (or, if they are not strictly ‘retellings’, for the light they might shed on the biblical text). Analysing retellings based on biblical characters or stories is not a matter of looking at the text and then asking how the literary, musical, or visual representation ‘got it right’ or ‘got it wrong’. A retelling of a biblical event or story, as the contributions to this volume reveal, is more than a simple transposition of a text onto a page, a canvas, a stage or celluloid. The retelling is itself an interpretation of the text and deserves to be studied for its own particular insights into and its time- and culture-bound perspective on the text. These insights and perspectives often can lead us to see something in the text we might have missed, or can help us appreciate the richness or complexity of the text, or encourage us to interrogate the text and its time- and culture-bound perspective or agenda. The present collection of essays on this important topic is appearing concurrently in a special issue of the journal Biblical Interpretation. Since it was founded in 1993, Biblical Interpretation has played a key role in fostering the publication of articles in the newly developing area of the reception history of the Bible in the arts. In addition to articles in regular issues of the journal, two special issues of Biblical Interpretation have been devoted especially to this topic, Beyond the Biblical Horizon: ?e Bible and the Arts (1999) and ?e Bible in Film/the Bible and Film (2006). Now, with Retellings, Biblical Interpretation is publishing for the ?rst time articles on the Bible in music, together with a diverse collection of essays dealing with the Bible and literature, art and ?lm. Music is something of a newcomer to the study of the Bible and the arts, perhaps because it has been more di?cult to make a musical score accessible to readers, and because, to deal with more than a libretto, a scholar must know not only about the Bible but also about music. Unlike art, where we can all see, for example, a painting before us and follow an argument about it, we cannot hear the music that is discussed in a scholarly article. But this is all changing, and analysis of the use of the Bible in music is being more and more represented in print as well as at scholarly meetings (the Society of Biblical Literature, for example, has sessions on the Bible and music at both its national and international meetings). The eight contributions to this volume illustrate a range of exciting approaches to retellings of the Bible in literature, music, art and ?lm and reveal something of the scope of this fascinating and rapidly expanding area of inquiry.
|
DISCLAIMER:
This site does not store Retellings: The Bible in Literature, Music, Art and Film on its server. We only index and link to Retellings: The Bible in Literature, Music, Art and Film provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete Retellings: The Bible in Literature, Music, Art and Film if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
|
|
|