Animal Poetics: Marianne Moore, Ted Hughes and the Song of Songs
In animal studies the Bible is often deemed a problematic anthropocentric heritage. There are, however, texts in the biblical archive that trouble such a judgment. Despite the picture given in scholarship on the Song of Songs, that (human) love and sex are at the centre of the poetry, animals are ev...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
[2017]
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| In: |
Literature and theology
Year: 2017, Volume: 31, Issue: 4, Pages: 405-419 |
| IxTheo Classification: | CD Christianity and Culture HB Old Testament NBE Anthropology NCF Sexual ethics |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Resolving-System) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | In animal studies the Bible is often deemed a problematic anthropocentric heritage. There are, however, texts in the biblical archive that trouble such a judgment. Despite the picture given in scholarship on the Song of Songs, that (human) love and sex are at the centre of the poetry, animals are everywhere in the text. In order to take account of these animals and the relationship between animality and poetry, I suggest that the twentieth-century poems of Marianne Moore and Ted Hughes provide a promising point of departure for rethinking the animal imagery of the Song of Songs. Moore and Hughes are both known for their animal imagery that plays with the possibilities and impossibilities of representation, exposing the tensions between the metaphorical and the literal, the mythic and the real. Rather than providing a niche 'animal reading' of the Song of Songs, I argue that the links between Moore, Hughes and the Song, open up for a renewed exploration of the idea of biblical poetry, as well as a rich engagement with the animal lives that abide so abundantly in these textual landscapes. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/frx029 |