Major Prophets

The article considers the phenomenon of intertextuality as a textual category. The non-recognition of intertextuality can lead to communication failure in dialogic, when the recipient attempts to enter the communicative intention of the sender, as well as at the time of reading, when the recipient is decoding and analyzing the information received. The relevance of the research is determined by the importance of the more detailed study of such means of explication of intertextual connections as allusion and precedent phenomena within the modern German poetry Internet discourse.
 The aim of research is to identify the means of intertextuality actualization, that are the causes of communication failure in the interpretation of the modern German texts. 
 Methodology and research methods. The research work used methods of systematization and generalization of the scientific material, a descriptive-analytical method, the method of lingual-stylistic analysis of the text. 
 Results. The article focuses on the polyphony of the German poetry texts, that is expressed in the incorporation of literary and cultural-specific codes. Precedent phenomena and allusions are the sources of communication failures in German poetry discourse and they serve as preferential ways of building intertextual connections in German poems. The author recommends to increase the levels of linguistic and general cultural competence in order to minimize the communicative dissonance, that is a result of the non-recognition of intertextuality.
 Scientific novelty lies in the study of the specifics of communication failures on the example of modern German poetry discourse.
 The practical significance is determined by the possibility of using the obtained scientific results in special university basic courses on translation theory, cognitive linguistics, stylistics and culture of speech, linguo-stylistic interpretation of the text.

Various modes of the author in the plays of Alexey Shipenko fi x the variety of forms and types, the complex interpretation of which suggests the idea of possible accumulation of the playwright’s creative energy in a single point, called “the Author”. Consideration of the author’s explications in characteristic combinations, designated as “author and author”, “author and reader / viewer”, “author and character”, allows us to put forward and to a certain extent confi rm the hypothesis about the concept of “author-universe”, actualized in the work of the playwright. Reseach is based on the texts of the book “Introduction” by A. Shipenko (“Mehr Licht (More light)”, “Tsurikon”). A. Shipenko’s dramatic art, being primarily absurdist, is a kaleidoscope where literary genres, cultural universals, historical epochs, styles, plots, and images are mutually refl ected. Surrealistic and cinematic merge of realities, “universal” and intertextual connections, diversity of images, non-standard textual form, a constant focus on alogism, which are innate for life, culture, and literary process, are the dominants of his texts, which are very explicitly represented through such a type of creative substance as the “author-universe”.

The Book of Chronicles has three aspects: the interpretation of Samuel-Kings, the history of Israel, and the Chronicler's own theology. To define its literary genre, it is essential to clarify how they relate to one another. Exegetical literature may deal with historical events or theological issues, but it must be in the end constrained by the sacred text. Historiography may reflect exegesis of the text or the author's theological view, but it must finally be controled by historical events. Theological literature may make use of exegesis or historical report, but it is free from both in expressing the author's theology. In this article we discuss the first point: whether Chronicles is dependent on the text of Samuel-Kings, and if it is exegetical literature.Firstly, we will deal with 1Chr 18-20, where large portions of Samuel material (David's treatment of Mephibosheth, his sin with Bath Sheba, and rebellions against him by Abshalom and Sheba) are omitted. It is often explained that, though the Chronicler basically follows the text of Samuel-Kings, he attempts to conceal unfavourable parts of David. However, the Chronicler does include such accounts elsewhere (1Chr 13, 21), and their absence can be better understood by his own thematic presentation of Saul-David and David-Solomon relationship. Moreover, in 1Chr 18-20, David's victories are consciously collected from various parts of Samuel in order to constitute a literary unit. It is placed immediately after the Davidic Promise (1Chr 17) to show the beginning of its fulfillment and God's blessing upon David.Secondly, we will discuss additional materials in the reign of Jehoshaphat (2Chr 17-20). They cannot be regarded as theological interpretation or expansion of Kings' text, because they are totally unrelated to it and the Chronicler's evaluation of Jehoshaphat is opposite. Rather these additions form the Chronicler's own retributional pattern, and the Chronicler's control over the material is evident.These analyses lead to a conclusion that Chronicles is essentially independent from the text of Samuel-Kings. Although the Chronicler uses the interpretation of the sacred text, he does so only as far as it is relevant to his theme. Therefore, Chronicles should not be seen as exegetical literature.

Small Talk:A New Reading of Marco Polo's Il milione Gang Zhou In his eloquently written book Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World, John Larner examines various interpretations of Marco Polo's book, Le Divisament Dou Monde ("The Description of the World," also called Il milione by Marco Polo's contemporaries), in terms of different genres in the Western medieval context: travel writing, the merchant's handbook, books of marvels, etc. Dissatisfied with these interpretations of the book's genre, Larner states, "to write the Book, that is to say, a new genre of western literature had to be created" (84). Taking Larner's discussion as the point of departure, I argue in this essay that, while Marco Polo's book pushes the limits of all these medieval Western genres, it demands an alternative perspective that reads "the Book" in light of the Chinese narrative tradition. A close reading of the work shall demonstrate that it bears strong similarities to small talk, a genre of minor quasi-historic work in the Chinese narrative tradition. The term "small talk" (xiaoshuo) first appeared in the Zhuangzi, an ancient Chinese philosophical work, to signify insignificant topics and ideas.2 As a literary genre, small talk was first defined by Ban Gu (32–92 CE) in the Hanshu yiwenzhi ("treatise on the arts and writing" [End Page 1] in the Han Dynasty History) as "the gossip of the street." The prototype of a small talk writer was a minor officer, who as part of his official role collected the gossip on the street, and in retelling it gained prestige as a storyteller. The figure of Marco Polo as represented in his book was also someone who had gained his training and reputation as a storyteller during his service in Kublai's court. It is perhaps not that surprising that we find the narrative pattern reflected in Il milione conforms nicely to the expectations of the Chinese genre of small talk. Il milione in the West The enigma of Marco Polo's life, his journey to Asia as well as the writing of his book, has continued to provoke debate even in recent years.3 Most Marco Polo scholars, however, would agree that Marco Polo was born in Venice around 1254. When he left his homeland, together with his father Nicolo Polo and uncle Maffeo Polo to travel to the Far East, he was almost seventeen. They spent three years traveling to China, where Marco Polo served in Kublai's court for seventeen years, while traveling extensively in different parts of China and beyond. When the Polos finally returned to Venice in 1295, Marco Polo was forty-one, having spent most of his life between cultures and among foreigners. Around 1298, Marco Polo was taken prisoner, most probably during a protracted war between Venice and Genoa, and happened to share a cell with Rustichello of Pisa, a professional Arthurian romancer. Together, these two produced Marco Polo's book, The Description of the World. The earliest version of Marco Polo's book was written in "an uncouth French much mingled with Italian which sometimes puzzled even contemporary interpreters. . . ." (Moule and Pelliot 40). Within the first twenty years of its existence, the book had already been translated into Tuscan, Venetian, German, and Latin, later into Irish, and finally back into Venetian. There were few other medieval vernacular works to be found in so many languages at so early a stage of their existence. [End Page 2] The phenomenon attests to the popularity of Marco Polo's book from the moment of its birth. It also made for a book with multiple forms, because "from the first each copier omitted, abridged, paraphrased, made mistakes and mistranslations, as he saw fit, influenced naturally by his own point of view and immediate interests or purpose; and the result with which we have to deal is nearly 120 manuscripts of which, it is little exaggeration to say, no two are exactly alike" (Moule and Pelliot 40). In this sense, the book can be seen as the "collaborative effort of a whole culture" (92), as Mary Campbell observes in her analysis. While the collaboration between Marco Polo and Rustichello...

Die mystische Lyrik des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts: Untersuchungen–Texte–Repertorium

T he historical novel, by definition, combines fiction and history. While the fictional chronotope is ultimately selfcontained, the historical one is open to outside verification, since it invokes phenomena belonging to real space and time. Such dichotomy has on occasion prompted doubts concerning the legitimacy of historical fiction, which has sometimes been labeled as a contradictory or even mongrel genre. Summarizing early attacks against the historical novel, Osip Senkovskii, a prominent journalist of the age of Pushkin and Gogol, points to a cognitive anxiety that afflicts the reader: reader, being constantly disturbed by uncertainty in this mixture of truth and fiction, wants at every step to believe the author's words and yet at every step is afraid to be deceived, and, upon reading the novel ... does not know what to think of his impressions.' However, it is precisely this tension between fact and fiction, the empirical and aesthetic planes, that creates the peculiar dynamics of the historical novel (and other genres of documentary literature), endowing it with a unique and important dimension.2 This article will treat the relationship between fact and fiction in the Russian historical novel of the 1 830s and 1 840s. As the subject is very broad, it seems necessary to mention some aspects that will remain outside the scope of the current study. The issue of history and fiction has received much attention in recent theoretical writings. Over the last three decades, with the publication of works by W. B. Gallie, Arthur Danto, and especially Hayden White, there emerged an influential school of thought that views historiography from the standpoint of narrative theory. Proponents of this school deem historical narratives similar in essence to fictional ones since they are informed by identical rhetorical devices and categories of emplotment. I will leave these problems aside; neither will I address heated debates about historiography during the Romantic period in Russia (for example, in connection with the histories of Karamzin and Polevoi). I will take as the point of departure the

This essay examines Fatima Mernissi’s and Mohammed Arkoun’s strategies of rereading central texts of the classical Islamic tradition in order to develop a contemporary normative grammar of critique. Mernissi reconsiders marginalized intellectuals and theoretical schools of Islamic history and derives immanent principles of justice. From a feminist perspective, she criticizes the dominantly patriarchal interpretations of Islamic foundational texts. Taking the classical humanism of Miskawayh as a point of departure, Arkoun carves out his conception of justice. Based on both Islamic religious ethics and antique Greek philosophy, he develops a transcultural humanism. Methodologically, Arkoun suggests a deconstructive examination of the classical Islamic texts to free Islamic thought from orthodox strictures. By way of conclusion, the article suggests that Mernissi’s and Arkoun’s progressive interpretation of the classical Islamic heritage may help to overcome the narrow, identitarian understanding of Islamic thought prevalent in both Muslim and Western societies.

David A. Brondos, Professor of Theology and Biblical Studies and Dean at the Theological Community of Mexico, an ecumenical consortium of seminaries in Mexico City which includes Lutherans such as the author, hopes that his two-volume work will “change forever the way in which the New Testament allusions to the salvific significance of Jesus’ death are understood” (p. 1). He wants to convince his readers that the traditional interpretation that ascribes saving significance to Jesus’s death from patristic times to the present are foreign to the thought of the NT texts. He believes that the failure to understand the gospel regarding Jesus and his death is the reason the message of the church has failed to affect the world and transform the lives of people (p. 4). He describes his project as “descriptive” rather than prescriptive, as “almost entirely” historical reconstruction rather than interacting with contemporary ideas and beliefs (p. 4, 9), emphasizing that he hopes to convince his readers that the traditional view of the salvific signification of Jesus’s death is wrong.The book is divided into “Background” (vol. 1, with 10 chapters) and “Texts” (vol. 2, with chs. 11–18). Chapter 1 surveys views on Jesus’s death in traditional Christian thought. He distinguishes forensic (penal substitution), ontological (physical), and ethical (revelational) views, evaluating “theological problems and presuppositions” for each. Brondos argues that “in the end” all of these interpretations are problematic (p. 80), a verdict that is not developed from an assessment of the biblical texts. Chapters 2–4 discuss Jewish soteriology and concepts of sacrifice, atonement, and vicarious suffering and death in “Second Temple” and “ancient Jewish” thought, mixing OT texts with early Jewish texts. He discounts any interpretation of texts that argues that sacrifices atoned for sins; what atones for sins is “repentance and a commitment to living in the way God desired and commanded for the good of all” (p. 277).Chapter 5, which Brondos calls “the third part” of his work (p. 11; not marked as such in the outline) analyzes how Jesus himself interpreted his suffering and death (pp. 279–368). He capitulates in the attempt to interpret Jesus’s words at the Last Supper (pp. 344–56) since the phrases “for you” and “for many” are so ambiguous that one can read “virtually any understanding of Jesus’ death” back into them (p. 345). He allows that Jesus likely saw his death as comparable to a sacrifice offered for others but deems it unlikely that Jesus was preoccupied with the question of forgiveness of sins. He suggests Jesus believed that his death “for others” meant that his intercession on behalf of his followers constitutes a new foundation on the basis of which they might approach God to obtain acceptance and forgiveness (p. 345). He concludes that “there can be little doubt” that Jesus understood his death as an act of love for others and that “Jesus must have seen his death as the only means by which the type of alternative community that he had dedicated his ministry to establishing might be brought into existence” (pp. 356, 368).Chapters 6–10, which are described as “the heart of this work” (p. 11), discuss the views of Jesus’s followers concerning the crucified Jesus as Lord and mediator, the will of God and the law, Jesus’s death and the new covenant community, the fulfillment of the Scriptures and the divine plan, and the story of Jesus’s death for others and formulas used to refer to Jesus’s death (pp. 369–660). Brondos concludes that, when Jesus’s first followers said “Jesus gave up his life for us,” they had in mind not only his death on the cross but his entire life. Jesus’s death was “the ultimate and supreme manifestation and expression of his dedication to his mission of making a new life possible for them and others . . . it was not Jesus’ death in itself that led to life and salvation for others, but the absolute dedication to a ministry aimed at giving life and salvation to others of which his death had been the result” (p. 654, Brondos’s emphasis).The following chapters discuss Paul (ch. 11–12), the disputed letters of Paul and 1 Peter (ch. 13), the Synoptic Gospels and Acts (ch. 14), Hebrews (ch. 15), and Johannine literature (ch. 16), examining passages that ascribe salvific significance to Jesus’s death (pp. 665–1108). He finds that each of the passages he discusses confirms the understanding of Jesus’s death that he developed in chs. 2–10 “rather than any of the traditional interpretations of Jesus’ death” considered in ch. 1 (p. 13). In chs. 17 and 18, he discusses Jesus’s death in the writings of the apostolic fathers, Justin Martyr, Melito of Sardis, and Irenaeus of Lyons.Brondos does not engage the exegetical arguments of scholars, including scholars who argue for the presence of the concept of penal substitution, which is his main target. A favorite strategy is to point to multiple senses in which a passage can be understood, or to declare the syntax and the logic of a text to be problematic, or to formulate statements that are true in a narrow sense but ignore the context. An example for the latter is his discussion of passages that have been used to demonstrate the forensic nature of Paul’s understanding of atonement of sins, such as Rom 3:25; 5:6–10; 8:3–4. His assertion that “nowhere does Paul call on others to believe in the saving efficacy of Christ’s death” (p. 673) is correct in a narrow, literal sense but runs afoul of the references to righteousness, justification, grace, and redemption as God’s gifts to believers in Rom 3:22, 24, 26 in the context of references to sin, punishment for sins, and Jesus’s death (3:23, 25); or the references to justification, salvation, and reconciliation in Rom 5:9, 10, 11 in the context of references to the blood and death of Jesus (5:9, 10); or the references to salvation, righteousness, holiness, and redemption in 1 Cor 1:18, 21, 30 in the context of references to Jesus’s death by crucifixion (1:23; 2:2).Brondos’s charge that the traditional understanding of Jesus and his death has been incapable of affecting the world and the lives of people is a colossal misstatement of facts. Brondos seems to be ignorant of the transformation of societies, cultures, and individual lives in the early so-called Middle Ages resulting from the work of Irish-Scottish missionaries on the Continent (see L. von Padberg’s Mission und Christianisierung, Steiner, 1959), from the work of both Catholic and Protestant missionaries and social reformers, German Pietists such as Zinzendorf and Francke, British Methodists such as Whitefield and Wesley, Wilberforce of the evangelical wing of the Church of England, and a multitude of both well-known and unknown Christians. Of course there have been Christians, or people who claimed to be Christians, who have “practiced and promoted injustice and oppression at times, often in the name of God and on the basis of Scripture” (p. 4). Linking this kind of behavior with a substitutionary view of Jesus’s death seems based more on ideology than on dispassionate historical analysis.Brondos wants to retain the NT formulations about Jesus’s death, but because he does not want to understand Jesus’s death as having saving significance in a forensic sense, he has to play with “several senses” (p. 659) that one can attribute to the connection between Jesus’s life and his death. In the end, for Brondos, Jesus is a hero who died for his convictions, not—not really, at least not fundamentally, certainly not in a forensic sense—a Savior.

There is an unfair view that writers in African languages are artists who mostly focus on aspects of literary genres such as theme, plot, characterisation, conflict, setting, time, language and style. From a thematic point of view, Mathivha’s (1974) drama Mabalanganye is often regarded as one that depicts the Tshivenḓa-speaking community of yesteryear, when African royal leadership were a law unto themselves. Some see it as a mythical story in which Mathivha illustrates and reconstructs some failed African history. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate through critical language awareness, and the social constructionist and ethnography of communication theories how Mathivha employs elements of drama to highlight the sociocultural and political life of identity creation and social relations among the Vhavenḓa people of South Africa. Mathivha uses epithets such as titles, clan names and praise poetry as both referential expressions and address names to demonstrate how they construct identities that establish social relations between royal leadership and their subjects, in order to illustrate participatory nationbuilding endeavours. Through these expressions, Mathivha further illustrates how African indigenous knowledge is regenerated to be lived and experienced as a sociocultural and political resource.

The article deals with the skill of Abai Kunanbayuly in translating into Kazakh the works of the great classics of world literature: Schiller, Goethe, Byron, A. Pushkin, I. Bunin, M. Lermontov, I. Krylov, A. Mitskeevich, who contributed to the formation of literary translation in the national literature. The analysis shows that Abay, realizing the concept of wise thoughts set forth on the example of I. Krylov, makes efforts to translate his own works. I. I. In Krylov's fables, it is shown that wisdom, expressed in the awareness of the concept of thought, makes efforts to translate as its own work, and at the end of each example, edifying reasoning is given. Also, using the methods of comparison, interpretation, grouping and textual analysis of original texts and texts of literary translation, it is told about the useful art the poet received from the Russian literature through translation, and was able to apply it to his work. The methods of transformation used in the Abai translations are determined: generalization, concretization, antonymization, etc. The purpose of A. Kunanbayuly in the matter of literary translation is revealed. An example is one of the oldest genres in world literature, any example involves edifying reflection on the reader. It is also noted that the origin, development of the example is closely connected with the name of the Greek poet Aesop.

The article is devoted to the study of the actual task of national translation studies, linguistic culture - the problems of translation of poetic texts. Attention is drawn to the theory and history of the translation interpretation of Abai's works. The experience of the translator M. Simashko and the bilingual translator M. Adibaev in preserving the features of the style, the creative position of the poet was studied. The quality of the translation is given a scientific assessment. In Abai's translations into Russian, a deep thought of a realistic national-colorful picture or Turkism’s was found. The structural similarity with the Kazakh language is revealed. It is impossible not to agree with the judgments of the scientist R.K. Kaishibayeva speaks about the inseparable connection of the art of the word with elements of the native language, that a literary work is inextricably linked with its linguistic environment, and it cannot be moved to another. Only the translator's talent can revive a work in another language. Abai sought to convey his vision of philosophy, history, his view of the development of the world; he tried to bring humanity to mutual understanding and contact, to an understanding of national differences as a phenomenon that not only contradicts this interaction, but, on the contrary, enriches everyone with spiritual power and wisdom. The study is based on scientific concepts of analyzing the artistic text and artistic national world, as well as study of paradigms of the meaning of education and artistic and psychological interpretation of the image of the well in the story “Well” by A. Kekilbaev and in the novel by Kh. Murakami’s novel “The Winding Bied Chronicles”. The sources to which the authors turn are the basis for the development of the author's vision of the world and distant historical times.

‘Historically informed performance’ (HIP) has become standard practice for the performance of ‘early music’ composed before 1800 and is increasingly applied to more recent compositions. The approach provokes controversy for the tension between its claims to replicate historical performance practice, the observation that the resulting ‘period’ style often reflects present-day stylistic preferences and the inference that its attribution to the past is more imagined than real. Musicians who practice HIP identify dilemmas which relate to questions of historical evidence and interpretation. The philosophy of music currently neglects the dilemmas that performers identify as problematic for HIP. In contrast, the philosophy of history makes scant reference to musical performance but extensively examines the understanding and interpretation of historical texts. Musicians share with historians the need to engage with the past. Musicians should find it instructive to consult the philosophy of history on how historians construct an account of the past. Historians may find informative the way in which the nature of music and the HIP of older music highlight performative aspects of the historical account, allow comparison between parallel debates in historiography and musicology and suggest how changes over time in audience reception affect the comprehensibility of the historical account.

The Old English poem Pharaoh has been largely unconsidered in critical literature owing to its formal and interpretive obscurities, which have led to its relegation to a secondary place in the Old English poetic canon. The text has traditionally been read as an unsuccessful attempt at replicating Latin models of dialogic literature to invite reflection on the typological associations of the crossing of the Red Sea. It has accordingly been read almost exclusively as part of an Easter sequence within the Exeter Book. As a result, the poem has remained unexplored in terms of its artistic quality and potential intertextual connections with other texts and traditions within and beyond the corpus of Old English poetry. This study reassesses the form, function, and interpretation of Pharaoh and provides a new reading of the poem by relocating it within its appropriate contextual background in both Christian doctrine and the Old English poetic corpus. To this end, a new reconstruction of a textual crux is proposed, which reveals that Pharaoh should be read against a new interpretive framework. Drawing from textual parallels in Latin and Old English, this study suggests that Pharaoh is an experiment in textual form and poetic mode that draws inspiration from the common ubi sunt motif and its vernacular adaptation in Old English literature. Ultimately, the interpretive complexity of Pharaoh poses a challenge to modern ideas of intertextuality and literary genre, which prioritise a hierarchical rather than horizontal model of textual influence.

Michael B. Prince’s study The Shortest Way with Defoe is an extraordinary accomplishment. Depicting Defoe as an archironist, Prince’s study measures Defoe’s ironies with precision, designedly treading a trail of speculations that might well have delighted Defoe himself. It is, in fact, the sort of work Defoe might even have written had he turned his considerable talents to the field of literary criticism and taken himself as his subject. The result is one of the most intelligent, provocative, deeply researched, and—a word one rarely feels tempted to use in the context of reviewing—pleasurable works of literary and historical analysis that I have had the good fortune to read in recent years.Erudite without being weighty, highly readable and remarkably clear on even the most tangled of topics, The Shortest Way with Defoe is innovative in its reframing of an author for whom oceans of criticism already exist. Prince’s study rests on the core conceit (much in the spirit of its subject) that Defoe’s career path as a novelist can be traced to a highly personal antipathy toward one of his most vituperative nemeses, Charles Leslie, the noted Tory cleric and polemicist. That Leslie’s critiques of Defoe hounded him across his life seems indubitable, as Prince amply documents. That Defoe took these attacks as deeply to heart as Prince argues may be less certain. But whether Leslie was the primary target of Defoe’s wrath and the proximate cause of his literary works matters less than the skill with which Prince uses this lens to relocate Defoe within literary history and to reenvision modern European narrative history from this perspective.Discussing a broad range of Defoe’s fiction (starting with the early satirical essay The Shortest Way with Dissenters, which landed him in prison), The Shortest Way with Defoe deploys in its design many elements of narrative structure and psychological characterization that Defoe himself deployed so ingeniously in his novels. It is a notable work of scholarship, abundantly provisioned with notes that indicate Prince’s familiarity with eighteenth-century European literary studies and the history of the novel, as well as with the ideological and theological debates that lie behind these histories. But it is at the same time an academic version of Defoe’s own experiments with narrative—mystery fiction, spy novel, science fiction, roman à clef, and other popular literary genres—and is propelled by the same devices of suspense and imaginative fantasy that underlie the appeal of these forms.This Shortest Way consists of an introduction and a methodological conclusion bracketing four chapters, each devoted to one key work of Defoe’s from 1702 to 1720. Prince’s readings are rich in detail about the context and reception of each work and conversant with the many strands of contemporary criticism on each. He is especially illuminating on Defoe’s less successful and more neglected works: his lunar-voyage satire The Consolidator (1705) and his contributions to the multivolume, multiauthor Letters Written by a Turkish Spy (1718). On both, Prince offers persuasive insights into Defoe’s possible intentions in adopting the guise of these offbeat genres and on how and why these experiments went awry. Prince’s discussion of the lunar voyage in the context of Lucianic satire shows the value of his deep knowledge of literary history and the equal value of linking that knowledge to contemporary approaches like semiotics. His comparison of Swift’s and Defoe’s uses of allegorical satire and nonallegorical satire, respectively, alertly captures and connects their contrasting formal and ideological purposes. The subsequent discussion of Letters Written by a Turkish Spy makes brilliant use of Srinivas Aravamudan’s work on the cosmopolitan novel to explore what Prince terms the “singularity” of Defoe’s characters (105) as they couch their dissenting perspectives within an assertion of the truth value such singularity enables.Although Defoe’s deist tendencies (Prince defines deism as a commitment to some form of natural religion and a rejection specifically of Trinitarian beliefs) are at the core of the analysis, Prince is not (at least not primarily) offering an argument about Defoe’s personal beliefs. He contends instead that Defoe’s strategic appropriation of deist arguments and genres was instrumental to his polemical purposes. Thus “Defoe’s mortal battle with Charles Leslie led him to deploy rhetorical weapons of known deist association” (100). Prince claims convincingly that the imprisonment and pillorying that followed the publication of The Shortest Way with Dissenters left Defoe traumatized and cautious yet eager for revenge—provided he could minimize his risk of political retribution. Hence the ironic “ventriloquizing” (14) and masking that marked all of Defoe’s subsequent narrative ventures. In this regard, his mixed method of allegory and counterallegory gave him deniability with respect to his intentions.Yet the ruse was transparent to his adversaries (more so, Prince contends, than subsequent critics have acknowledged). Prince offers considerable evidence that Defoe was perceived by his foes as a deist. “While one could be a leveler without being a deist and a deist without being a leveler, Defoe’s enemies accuse him of both” (136). His writings, fiction and nonfiction alike, were for them Trojan horses filled with deist skepticism.This specific historical claim rests on a more general hermeneutic understanding of the intimate connection of form, content, and ideology in literature. While specific literary forms are, for Prince, ideologically neutral, they do lend themselves more and less well to particular ideological stances. Prince draws on modern theorists (Bakhtin and others) to frame this discussion, arguing that both genres and modes of interpretation were recognized by Defoe and his antagonists as ideologically loaded. Thus “for Leslie, typology is to representation what the Trinity is to faith” (167).Here is where Prince walks most clearly in Defoe’s path—and with comparable ingenuity. This work of criticism is itself a mystery or spy novel, a hermeneutic puzzle, a psychological case study, and more. It is in its own way a lesson that “right reading” cannot be univocal, for the human mind (at least one like Defoe’s) is not of a single mind with itself. As Prince says in discussing Defoe’s assimilation of Menippean satire, “Defoe’s contraptions show special interest in cognition, in picturing the mind at work” (81). Or, in discussing the post–Robinson Crusoe Serious Reflections, “His approach to these problems [apparitions] veers toward psychology and away from divinity” (222). Inhabiting the consciousness and style of others, Defoe became the penetrating precursor of the most characteristic component of the modern novel, psychoanalysis.Despite presenting itself as a single-author study within British literary history, The Shortest Way with Defoe is visibly much more. Its conclusion builds on Erich Auerbach’s idea of an Ansatzpunkt to clarify the theory of reading that underlies this text. “The point of departure must be the election of a firmly circumscribed, easily comprehensible set of phenomena whose interpretation is a radiation out from them and which orders and interprets a greater region than they themselves occupy” (quoted on 209). While acknowledging predecessors from Ian Watt on, Prince shifts our sense of Defoe as a writer (his sources of inspiration, his purposes, his modes, his styles) and of his place in British literary history. Prince’s Defoe remains, to be sure, a journalist-novelist or spiritual autobiographer. But this Defoe is more fundamentally driven by his sustained engagement in the theological and political debates of his time, so that we need to rectify “the absence of deism from our received histories of the novel” (116).This study also suggests alternative histories of modern European narratives. These would depart from Cervantes and proceed through Robinson Crusoe and on to Rousseau and Romantic fiction—especially German Romanticism, with its elaborate theorizing of Romantic irony, where we see a similar “transition from irony as a figure of speech to irony as a sustained narrative invention, situated in a genre or a combination of genres that fostered the same poise or balance between alternatives at the structural level” (54; what Friedrich Schlegel termed Schweben, or what Prince later notes was called “equivalence” by classical skepticism). This Shortest Way opens out as well into revisionary accounts of other major realist writers—Meredith’s early experimentation with “Oriental” genres, or Disraeli’s late appropriation of the same—where future critics might treat differently authors’ experimental bases for literary-historical success, seeing anew works that may have long been regarded as failures. For Prince’s rereadings of Defoe’s lunar-voyage and spy narratives are critically programmatic. As he says, “Failure never gets enough credit. . . . A preoccupation with success skews our understanding of both the artist’s development and cultural history” (49). Prince’s text has, moreover, considerable (if implicit) contemporary relevance in an era marked once again by religiously driven conflicts and exhibiting manifold tendencies toward theological dogmatism and theocratic aspirations. We, like Defoe, badly need what Prince describes as “alternative” forms that might escape or exceed “the prism of party politics and ideology” (132).To return, however, to the question of plausibility: how much does it matter how much credence a reader gives to the most suppositious of Prince’s assertions about figures like Leslie or Henry Sacheverell, whom Prince finds, for instance, behind the admittedly mysterious wolves and bear that show up at the end of Robinson Crusoe? Or to his suppositions about Defoe’s ties to William Penn and Quakerism, or to Defoe’s familiarity with Rosicrucianism? These are hard questions to pose to an avowed disciple of irony, who asserts that the wolves and bear are “an act of undetectable literary revenge” (204) yet elsewhere says simply that Defoe exhibits “a far more playful attitude toward religion than [his] apologists allow” (220). Yet the embrace of suggestiveness may be Prince’s most Defoe-like trait. However valid the Defoe-Leslie key may be, one level of irony need not cancel other interpretive possibilities. Defoe as Puritan, as colonialist, or as racist European imperialist—these and other personae remain visible behind Prince’s Defoe. One is grateful to a critic who can conclude about his subject that he is, fundamentally, “contradictory, opaque to himself” (161)—as, indeed, are we all.

The Glory of the Crucified One: Christology and Theology in the Gospel of John