Edmund Wilson, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the rhetoric of protection

Abstract

Abstract Edmund Wilson’s “The Scrolls from the Dead Sea,” published on the 6th of May, 1955 in The New Yorker, was one of the first pieces of journalism concerning the Dead Sea Scrolls and their discovery in the Judean desert in the late 1940 s. This study links the rhetoric within journalism on ancient manuscript finds to that which is found in travel narratives from the colonial era – a connection which emphasizes the rhetoric of protection and insertion of self in texts which invoke assumed authority in a situation of cultural importance.