Landscapes of the Song of Songs: Poetry and Place

by Elaine T. James

Overview

In this masterful new study of the ancient poetry of the Song of Songs, Elaine T. James explores the Song's underlying interest in the natural world. Engaging with the fields of geography, landscape architecture, and literature, James critiques the tendency of scholars to reify a perceived dichotomy between "nature" and "culture" and instead argues that the poetic attention to landscape indicates an awareness of a viewer. Nature is here a poetic device that informs James's close-readings of agrarianism, gardens, cities, social control, and feminism and the gaze in the Song. With this two-fold emphasis on landscape and lyric, Landscape of the Song of Songs shows how the Song persistently envisions a world in which human lovers are embedded in the natural world, complexly enfolded in relationships of fragility and care.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190619015
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/03/2017
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Elaine T. James is Assistant Professor of Theology at St. Catherine University.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Landscape and Lyric
2. The Agrarian Landscape
3. The Garden
4. The Cityscape
5. The Map of the Body
6. Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

"In this elegant study, James deftly maps the multifaceted landscapes of the Song with a combination of expert poetic analysis and nuanced interpretation, along with judicious use of ancient Near Eastern archaeological and topographical evidence and current ecological and environmental perspectives. Though primarily explicating the Song of Songs in its literary, social, and eco-historical context, this study offers bracing, delectable food for thought regarding a responsible "ethics of care" amidst our pressing ecological crisis. I highly recommend this volume; it is guaranteed to expand one's horizons on this provocative biblical book." — F. Scott Spencer, Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology

"Landscapes of the Song of Songs is a superb study of the co-constitutive relationship of land and humanity and of their lyrical presentation in the Song. Her emphasis on the blurring of human/land boundaries through cultivation and care (both physical and metaphorical) is a welcome corrective to the dominant trend of "nature" and "culture" in binary opposition. This book makes a welcome addition on the shelf of anyone interested in land-oriented or more broadly ecological approaches to the HB, and her detailed close readings provide excellent fodder for the scholar of biblical poetry in general or the Song in particular to graze upon." — Jared Beverly, Horizons in Biblical Theology

"In a heady mix of hard-nosed literary criticism and enlivening theory, Elaine James elaborates a series of care-full and close readings of selected poems from the Song of Songs thematized around the natural and cultivated landscapes that form the base of this poetry's imaginary. The result is an achingly beautiful and evocative exploration of the Song that is at once highly original and uncommonly sensible. And the writing is exquisite. Rarely has biblical scholarship been so rapturously rendered. A smart and delightful read." — F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, author of On Biblical Poetry

"Elaine James has written a lovely book, sensitive, detailed, thoroughly immersed in the literature of the Song of Songs and theoretically sophisticated. She shows, through careful and intricate studies of the motifs of vineyard, pastorale, garden and city, how landscape and the body, nature and culture, mutually imbricate each other, and concludes with a splendid, synaesthetic study of the descriptive portraits of the woman. Her writing is as beautiful and passionate as her subject matter." — Francis Landy, Professor Emeritus, the University of Alberta

"Study of the Song of Songs gets a shot in the arm with this sensational new book by Elaine James. Good close readers of biblical poetry are few and far between, and we can count James among the best. And by combining close, literary attention with an in-depth engagement with landscape studies and ecological criticism James opens up the poetry in new and exciting ways." -Tod Linafelt, author of The Hebrew Bible as Literature: A Very Short Introduction

"Elaine T. James brings a novel approach to the poetics of the Song of Songs (hereafter, the Song) by focusing on the text's evocation of various types of landscapes ... This book's unique contribution is to show that the Song elaborates a vision of what it might mean to love one's land, which is to see it with affection and to intervene in it with care (151). James is at her best when she is explicating the poetry of the Song by analogy with other artistic expressions, ancient and modern." — Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society

From the Publisher