Landscapes of the Song of Songs: Poetry and Place

ISBN-13: 9780190619015 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 248 str.

Elaine T. James

Opis

In this masterful new study of the ancient poetry of the Song of Songs, Elaine T. James explores the Song's underlying interest in the natural world. Engaging with the fields of geography, landscape architecture, and literature, James critiques the tendency of scholars to reify a perceived dichotomy between "nature" and "culture" and instead argues that the poetic attention to landscape indicates an awareness of a viewer. Nature is here a poetic device that informs James's close-readings of agrarianism, gardens, cities, social control, and feminism and the gaze in the Song. With this two-fold emphasis on landscape and lyric, Landscape of the Song of Songs shows how the Song persistently envisions a world in which human lovers are embedded in the natural world, complexly enfolded in relationships of fragility and care.

Recenzje

Elaine T. James brings a novel approach to the poetics of the Song of Songs (hereafter, the Song) by focusing on the text's evocation of various types of landscapes ... This book's unique contribution is to show that the Song elaborates a vision of what it might mean to love one's land, which is to see it with affection and to intervene in it with care (151). James is at her best when she is explicating the poetry of the Song by analogy with other artistic expressions, ancient and modern.

O autorze

Elaine T. James is Assistant Professor of Theology, St. Catherine University