Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture

by Robert Alter

Approaching the debates about literary canon from an entirely new angle, a foremost literary critic explores how a range of iconoclastic twentieth-century authors (in particular Kafka, Bialik, and Joyce) have put to use the paramount canonical text--the Hebrew Bible. Robert Alter argues against the notion that the canon is a vehicle of ideological enforcement and shows instead that canons are by nature surprisingly elastic and enabling for later writers

Genres: Religion

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967, and has published many acclaimed works on the Bible, literary modernism, and contemporary Hebrew literature.