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Biography seemed to have little to offer in comparison to literature itself. From this perspective, it is perceived as being at best marginal to literature, and at worst as antithetical to the literary. This negative relation is predominant in the French tradition, where writers themselves have repeatedly and vehemently protested against what they perceived as extraneous imposition of the ‘life’ onto the literary ‘work’. This chapter addresses whether biography has any critical validity in the study of literary texts, when their prime concern is considered by the critical parti pris and by their authors to be aesthetic. In it, the focus is on Sainte-Beuve, the founder and exemplar of the biological approach to literary criticism. The chapter determines whether and how his method acquired general critical validity, what its critical presuppositions were, and how it conceived of literature and the literary.

This is the fourth of five chapters on the text of the Old Testament, and focuses on the Hebrew prose narrative of the Old Testament. It starts by discussing the various definitions of the term narrative (as a mode of discourse; as a vehicle of narrative communication; as definable text) and the difficulties of determining which particular definable biblical texts are narrative texts, and notes that the attempt by the critic–reader to define so simple a thing as the narrative text is fraught with issues that have as much to do with the reader as with the text. The author notes that the title of the chapter and its placement within the ‘text’ part of the division of the book into parts on readers, text, and authors, might suggest a singular objective entity (the text) produced by authors, read by readers, and conceptually separable from both, but that the reality is more complicated. The Old Testament is described as a fuzzy‐edged concept, not a fixed object, and its text not as one but as beyond number; furthermore, the concept is ideologically loaded (i.e. reader‐oriented) and much of the essay is quite specifically not about the (Christian) Old Testament (which is why the hybrid term Hebrew Bible has been used). It is the author's understanding that there is no such thing as the text of the Old Testament apart from its readers and it is in this context that he gives an account (which he labels as partial) of biblical narrative and literary criticism over the past three decades; this is presented as an account not of what is in the biblical narratives, but of what some readers have claimed to find in these texts, and how they have gone about finding it.

In addition to laying out a general groundwork for the Catholic imagination as a critical lens—and suggesting a variety of ways that the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar aids critics in articulating such a theological vision—the chapter also attempts to locate the particular phenomena of postmodernism and deconstruction within the intersection of theology and narrative art. Balthasar anticipates the tendency of current critical theory to privilege and emphasize the amorphous breadth of both linguistic and cultural expression; and he anticipates the critical tension between those who read Catholicism as theological truth and those that might read Catholicism as a “fluctuating signifier,” as a cultural and/or literary text. Under this general theme, a dialog is opened with such diverse critics as William Lynch, Paul Giles, Michel De Certeau, and Jacques Derrida. Like them, Balthasar's theology plots a route for appreciating the aesthetic complexity and theological possibility of a broadly canvassed intertextuality and interdisciplinarity. However, Balthasar's program also defends the critical uniqueness of certain theological commitments (e.g., the transcendentals, the Incarnation, and the trinitarian structure of being) and looks to the arts to demonstrate the formal expression and aesthetic span of these phenomena. The chapter concludes with the proposition that it is the recognition of these essential questions that both challenge and aid the articulation of a Catholic imagination and that a turn to representative work in literature, poetry, and film will aid in such an articulation.

This chapter moves beyond Britain to examine the Scrutiny movement's fortunes overseas. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the Kenyon School of English and Eric Bentley's anthology for American readers drew Scrutiny into efforts to enshrine criticism (and in particular the New Criticism) in American universities’ English programmes. University English departments were reorganized along Leavisian lines in Ceylon in the 1940s and Australia in the 1960s. Australian literature was not a major concern for Samuel Goldberg, the architect of the ‘Leavisite’ experiment at the University of Sydney in the 1960s, but Goldberg's plans were nevertheless based on an interpretation of colonial culture that borrowed heavily from F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson's early work. The cultural or ‘sociological’ interests of early Scrutiny writings would also function as models or suggestions for ways of writing about colonial or national literary cultures in contexts as various as India, New Zealand, and Scotland.

The first chapter demonstrates the fundamental importance of textual studies to hermeneutics generally and to the specific act of criticism in particular. It assumes that literary study surrendered some of its most powerful interpretive tools when it allowed textual criticism and bibliography to be regarded as ‘preliminary’ rather than integral to the study of literary work. It argues that the non-integral view of textual criticism and bibliography is historically explicable. It also attempts both an exposition of this view of textual criticism and bibliography as well as a critique of its limits.

This chapter examines the inherently biographical principles of the literary criticism of Sainte-Beuve. Sainte-Beuve is credited with being the inventor of modern literary criticism and the chapter explores the way in which the biographical perspective of the critic is associated with the new task of identifying the literariness of literature, often expressed in terms of the individual genius of the writer. Literature has therefore to be reinvented with each new critical encounter. Sainte-Beuve's own poetry is read in terms of its presuppositions about its necessary relation to the poet's life. His depictions of poets and poetry itself also imply the need for the biographical perspective of a critical ‘other’. The suggestion is that criticism, with its biographical basis, is better placed to identify literariness than literature itself.

In the present methodological ferment in biblical studies it is necessary to articulate a methodological approach to the study of food in the Old Testament. The methodology outlined is fully responsive to research on the anthropology of food, the literary form of the biblical text and historical-critical biblical scholarship. The necessity of all these aspects is demonstrated through an analysis of work on the Israelite dietary laws in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14. For this classical interpretative puzzle Mary Douglas's work, Purity and Danger, has been a decisive turning point. Her analysis has stimulated many biblical scholars, but this has required her own views to be re-articulated in light of closer readings of the text and the work of historical-critical scholarship. The conversation not only shows the need for well informed use of anthropological research, literary analysis and historical-critical scholarship, but also the necessity of moving beyond tired debates between materialists and structuralists, or, in the usual terms of biblical scholarship, diachronic, and synchronic.

This chapter considers the ways in which sounds in Dante's Divine Comedy work. The purpose is to put into their theoretical and literary-critical context the key contributions to the debate of Gian Luigi Beccaria and others, by asking how a new view of the Divine Comedy emerged as a result of the impact of formalism, structuralism, and semiotics on the practice of literary criticism in Italy from the 1900s onwards. As theories concerned with the nature of literature and the literary, formalism, structuralism, and semiotics challenged the traditional treatment of Dante's poem, this held out the possibility of remedying its deficiencies through a more extensive consideration of its specifically literary properties. This chapter first considers the critical tradition dominant in Dante studies in Italy before the advent of these theories, then examines the distinctively Italian form of the theories.

This chapter examines in detail Pliny's ‘inclusive’ persona, and particularly the ways in which his correspondence fosters a community of addressees and develops a didactic project in literary friendship and literary criticism. The letter presents another lesson in how to operate in literary society, taught by a man who seems unsure of himself in literary production, but confident that he does at least know how the social sides of literary activity should function. Pliny's own iudicium is insufficient: he needs to see, hear, and act on the responses of his friends, and the recitation is part of the process of literary production. When friends fail in their duty to encourage and to provide frank substantive criticism, disapproval can degenerate into inuidia, the resentment (potentially resulting in malicious action) of another's success or material benefit, or the generalized ill-feeling incurred by inappropriate behaviour. It is a prominent motif in Cicero's letters, and is observed in Pliny's ‘episto-literary’ project.