Weltliteratur and the Biblical Critics

Abstract

In various and different ways, the chapters of this book have been leading to this point: that is the reception of the Bible during the period of Romanticism and in the nineteenth century into the new sense of ‘World-Literature’, and an eclectic sense of history and culture which both deconstructs the canon of Scripture while, in a new way, it affirms both its importance and its coherence. From the suggestive ‘indistinctness’ of Turner, this chapter will concentrate on the specific issues raised by Strauss’s epochal Das Leben Jesu, and particularly its effects on literature through its English translator George Eliot.

Far from repudiating canons, nineteenth-century critics demonstrate the recurring pattern of an aggressive anti-canonical idealism engaged in a search for ‘companions’ or ‘touchstones’, principles more widely acceptable or deeply penetrating than the inherited principles, canons in everything but name.¹