A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives: The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture

This book charts the mutations of a particularly buoyant sliver of Bible text - the book of Jonah - as it latches onto Christian and Jewish motifs and anxieties, passes through highbrow and lowbrow culture, and finally becomes something of a scavenger among the ruins, as, in its most resourceful move to date, it begins to live off the demise of faith. Written at a point between Cultural Studies, Jewish Studies, Literature and Art, this book is concerned with those versions of the biblical that escape proper disciplinary boundaries: it shifts the focus from 'Mainstream' to 'Backwater' interpretation. It is less a navigation of interpretative history and more an interrogation of larger political/cultural issues: anti-Judaism in Biblical Studies, the secularisation of the Bible, and the projection of the Bible as credulous ingenu, naive Other to our savvy post-Enlightenment selves.

• The most wide-ranging analysis of the cultural afterlives of a well-known biblical text: the Jonah story
• Stimulatingly interdisciplinary in scope, crossing Biblical Studies with Jewish Studies and Cultural Studies in a ground-breaking type of analysis that is only just beginning to take place
• Entertainingly written: this book aims to question some of the premises about the academic, not just in terms of content, but equally in terms of style

CONTENTS
Introduction; 1. The Mainstream; (i) Jonah and the Fathers: Jonah and Jesus as typological twins; (ii) Jonah the Jew: the evolution of a biblical character; (iii) Divine Disciplinary Devices: or the book of Jonah and a tractate on producing docile disciple-bodies; (iv) Cataloguing the Monstrous: Jonah and the Cani Cacharis (or a concluding scientific postscript); (v) Taking Stock: survivals, hauntings, Jonah and (Stanley) fish, and the Christian colonisation of the book of Jonah; 2. Backwaters and Underbellies; (i) Jewish Interpretation; (ii) Popular Interpretation; (iii) On the Strained Relations Between the Backwaters and the Mainstream: or how Jewish and popular readings are prone to bring on a bout of scholarly dyspepsia; (iv) Of Survival, Memes and Life-After-Death: on Jonah’s infinite regurgitation and endless survival; (v) Jonah on the Oncology Ward and the Beached-up Whale Carcass; or the strange secular afterlives of Biblical texts; 3. Regurgitating Jonah; (i) Of ‘Hot Chestnuts’, ‘Fluid Puddings’ and ‘Plots That Do Not Shelter Us’: some ruminations on the salvific properties of ‘the Bible’ and ‘literature’; (ii) Regurgitating Jonah; (iii) In conclusion Recuperating Jonah: the book of Jonah as the quintessential story and the most typical of Bible texts; Bibliography.