This book explores the complex relations among the hegemonic triad of territory, nation, and national literature that have characterized the modern European nation-state. In the case of Hebrew literature, this triad was unattainable and its components fiercely contested, hence the literary field itself was responsible for shaping the nation, preceding the nation-state itself.

This book explores the complex relations among the hegemonic triad of territory, nation, and national literature that have characterized the modern European nation-state. In the case of Hebrew literature, this triad was unattainable and its components fiercely contested, hence the literary field itself was responsible for shaping the nation, preceding the nation-state itself. ---------- Michael Gluzman is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University. ---------- The Politics of Canonicity sheds new light on the dynamics of canon formation in modern Hebrew literature. It explores the ways in which literary culture--as site and as tool--participates in the production of national identity. The aesthetic paradigms, political ideologies, and social interests that privilege certain texts and literary modes are reexamined within the framework of the conscious and deliberate practices of Zionism to formulate a national discourse. As the author shows, the suppressed, the marginal, the undesired "others" of the nation demonstrate the limits of both the literary canon and society's own self-understanding. The book combines the specific questions of Hebrew literature with a critical inquiry of the theoretical debates surrounding the notion of canon. It begins by examining the formative debate in both Hebrew letters and European discourses of modernity at the end of the nineteenth century which address the tension between writing the nation and writing the self. It moves on to the equally constitutive question within Jewish nationalism of the relation between diaspora and homeland in literary writing. While international modernism tends to glorify exile, Hebrew modernism demonstrated a fierce antagonism toward a "diaspora mentality." In his analysis of the suppressed margins of the Hebrew literary canon, the author outlines the specific aesthetic fault lines of the new national community. In chapters devoted to the poets David Fogel and Avot Yeshurun, and the poetics of a feminine voice in Rachel Bluvstein, Esther Raab, and Anda Pinkerfeld, he analyzes the historical tensions between margin and canon, highlighting the ways in which these marginalized poets were able to speak within a discursive system that suppressed their voices. We are grateful for support from the Koret Jewish Studies Publication Program. ---------- "An outstanding book that is certain to provoke wide discussion, Lines of Resistance will be essential for any future discussion of modernist Hebrew poetry. Well written--clear, fresh, and engaging--it will be invaluable to scholars in the field. Insofar as it engages in a dialogue with contemporary theories of nation building and canon formation, it is bound to appeal to literary critics in other fields as well."--Ilana Pardes, Hebrew University of Jerusalem "This book is highly recommended to anyone interested in Modern Hebrew liberature."--Association of Jewish Libraries

Most college and seminary courses on the New Testament include discussions of the process that gave shape to the New Testament. David Dungan re-examines the primary source for the history, the Ecclesiastical History of the fourth-century Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, in the light of Hellenistic political thought. He reaches new conclusions: that we usually use the term "canon" incorrectly; that the legal imposition of a "canon" or "rule" upon scripture was a fourth- and fifth-century phenomenon enforced with the power of the Roman imperial government; that the forces shaping the New Testament canon are much earlier than the second-century crisis occasioned by Marcion, and that they are political forces. Dungan discusses how the scripture selection process worked, book-by-book, as he examines the criteria used-and not used-to make these decisions. He describes the consequences of the emperor Constantine's tremendous achievement in transforming orthodox, Catholic Christianity into imperial Christianity. --From publisher's description.

Writing in the eighteenth century, the Persian-language litterateurs of late Mughal Delhi were aware that they could no longer take for granted the relations of Persian with Islamic imperial power, relations that had enabled Persian literary life to flourish in India since the tenth century C.E. Persian Authorship and Canonicity in Late Mughal Delhi situates the diverse textual projects of ‘Abd al-Qādir “Bīdil” and his students within the context of politically threatened but poetically prestigious Delhi, exploring the writers’ use of the Perso-Arabic and Hindavi literary canons to fashion their authorship. Breaking with the tendency to categorize and characterize Persian literature according to the dynasty in power, this book argues for the indirectness and complexity of the relations between poetics and politics. Among its original contributions is an interpretation of Bīdil’s Sufi adaptation of a Braj-Avadhi tale of utopian Hindu kingship, a novel hypothesis on the historicism of Sirāj al-Din ‘Alī Khān “Ārzū”s oeuvre and a study of how Bindrāban Dās “Khvushgū" entwined the contrasting models of authorship in Bīdil and Ārzū to formulate his voice as a Sufi historian of the Persian poetic tradition. The first book-length work in English on ‘Abd al-Qādir “Bīdil” and his circle of Persian literati, this is a valuable resource for students and scholars of both South Asian and Iranian studies, as well as Persian literature and Sufism.

This book explores the meaning of 'influence', which has played a central role in the formation of the canon, or tradition, of Western political thought. Via a critical overview of the relative fortunes of influence studies in the history of political thought, literary theory, and – at times – the history of art and poetry, it is possible to identify a dominant theory of the term. Nietzschean and ‘emanational’ in nature, thanks largely to the work of Harold Bloom, this particular theory views influence as mere power and represents a broadly accepted meaning in twentieth century thought. Canons or traditions of thought came to be institutions in themselves reflecting prevalent social and political inequalities. To be sure, a theory of influence as power came to be seen as complicit in arbitrary canon formation, across a range of disciplines. The book argues, ultimately, that a second theory of influence, imported from Mary Orr’s work on intertextuality, affords a rival perspective and a more positive, intergenerational meaning of influence. Orr’s ‘braided rope’ theory of influence allows for the development of a plurality of canons each capable of constructing new histories for a variety of epistemic communities. The existence of agonistic, rival canons presents pedagogical questions for all teachers of political theory, but one that can be potentially navigated by a new understanding of influence, in the Orrian tradition.

Halbertal provides a panoramic survey of Jewish attitudes toward Scripture, provocatively organized around problems of normative and formative authority, with an emphasis on the changing status and functions of Mishnah, Talmud, and Kabbalah.

An original take on literary history that uses visual satire to explore literature's importance to eighteenth-century political culture