Two new LHBOTS on Psalms released!

Ah, it's a beautiful day in New York City so let's celebrate by announcing some more LHBOTS!

We have now released Amy Cottrill's Language, Power, and Identity in the Lament Psalms of the Individual, Vol. 493 in both the UK and US. This work explores the rhetorical identity of the “I” in the lament psalms of the individual, with a particular focus on how the psalmist negotiates moral agency and constructs identity within the cultural, theological, and ideological assumptions and relational structures embedded in the language of the laments.

The work approaches the identity of the psalmist in a new way, not as a form-critical question, but as a rhetorical question. The assumption is that language affords identity. Readers will become better at identifying the specific rhetorical world of the laments of the individual. The work assists readers by identifying the particular rhetorical elements of the laments and the relational structures that shape the psalmist’s discursive identity.

Cottrill draws from cross-disciplinary resources (cultural anthropology, violence studies, social-scientific criticism, and literary criticism) in order to interpret and understand the particularity of the psalmist’s language in new ways. The over-arching theoretical framework is that of the figured world, a culturally constructed location of interpretation, which provides a way of entering and exploring the language used by the psalmist to represent his pain to himself and others, and the assumptions about relationship, selfhood, and restoration embedded in these prayers.

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Robert L. Foster and David M. Howard have edited My Words Are Lovely: Studies in the Rhetoric of the Psalms, Vol. 467. This collection of essays advances psalms studies through a concerted focus on the persuasive aim of psalmic poetry, and it offers unique perspectives on rhetorical devices within the psalms. These essays include discussions not only of structure, literary devices, and rhetorical strategies, but the authors also dialogue with classical rhetoric, modern psalms research, and current trends in rhetoric and cognitive science.

Part One discusses various theoretical issues. Several articles discuss lament within the psalms, including the function of appeals to pathos, lament's compensation for monotheistic piety, and the need for more attention to the laments' poetry and rhetoric to understand their meaning. Other essays address the psalmists' self-presentation, the ideological identity of the wicked within the psalms, faunal imagery with regard to tenor and vehicle, the topoi related to God in call to praise psalms, the function of gaps in prayers for help, and the rhetoric of kingship psalms as attempts to persuade readers of the legitimacy and efficacy of kingship.

Part Two consists of rhetorical analyses of several psalms or psalm pairs, each with distinctive emphases. These include a discussion of Psalm 8 from a bodily perspective, the nature and implication of nature language within Psalm 23, the structure of Psalm 102 within Book IV of the Psalter along with its theology and lament, the forensic case of Psalms 105 and 106 emphasizing the role of narrative in forensic rhetoric and comparing the results with classical rhetoric, and an analysis of the rhetorical aim of Psalm 147, subjected to developments within cognitive science.

This volume is available in both the US and UK.