It would be an understatement to say how thrilled we are to have Cheryl Exum's 'Fragmented Women' in our Cornerstones series. It is written with a true deftness of touch and the new preface that Exum has added to the volume continues in that vein and introduces the book to new readers by highlighting exactly the subtleties required in reading biblical texts.
Here are some reviews of the book:
“Cheryl Exum is remarkable for the subtlety of her interpretations. A fine literary sensibility combines with psychoanalytic finesse and an intense feminist commitment. She is very good at playing biblical characters off against each other: Bathsheba and the Levite's concubine, Jephthah's daughter and Michal. She is concerned with the androcentric agenda of the narrators, and how it may be subverted both by the text and the resistant reader. Does the depiction of rape repeat the crime or question it? For Exum, it does both; the male reader is both complicit and absolved. These brilliant, interconnected readings are as timely now as when they were first published.” – Francis Landy, University of Alberta, Canada
“This book is a model of mature, balanced, well considered feminist criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Exum deliberately steps out of both the ideology of the text and the confines of religious exegesis, reading the biblical text as a cultural artifact, with the tools of cultural as well as traditional bible criticism. She analyses afresh fragments of biblical stories about women that are embedded in stories about men. In so doing, she affords her readers new insights and angles for understanding the texts and their influence. And by bringing the stories together, Exum manages to defragment the women, at least a little. And this is no mean achievement.” – Athalya Brenner-Idan, Professor emerita, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands
“Cheryl Exum is remarkable for the subtlety of her interpretations. A fine literary sensibility combines with psychoanalytic finesse and an intense feminist commitment. She is very good at playing biblical characters off against each other: Bathsheba and the Levite's concubine, Jephthah's daughter and Michal. She is concerned with the androcentric agenda of the narrators, and how it may be subverted both by the text and the resistant reader. Does the depiction of rape repeat the crime or question it? For Exum, it does both; the male reader is both complicit and absolved. These brilliant, interconnected readings are as timely now as when they were first published.” – Francis Landy, University of Alberta, Canada
“This book is a model of mature, balanced, well considered feminist criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Exum deliberately steps out of both the ideology of the text and the confines of religious exegesis, reading the biblical text as a cultural artifact, with the tools of cultural as well as traditional bible criticism. She analyses afresh fragments of biblical stories about women that are embedded in stories about men. In so doing, she affords her readers new insights and angles for understanding the texts and their influence. And by bringing the stories together, Exum manages to defragment the women, at least a little. And this is no mean achievement.” – Athalya Brenner-Idan, Professor emerita, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/fragmented-women-9780567662958/#sthash.qGPIxxc4.dpuf
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