Review of Fiona Black (ed.),The Recycled Bible:Autobiography, Culture and the Space Between

Abstract

There are 8 articles in this collection, introduced and edited by Fiona Black, and discussed by Erin Runions and George Aichele. All in all it is a slender, but sophisticated and thought-provoking volume, which touches upon many aspects of self, Christianity, and Bible. It also contains a number of disclosures, not to mention surprises. The rich nature of each article, as well as the thorough responses given by Runions and Aichele means that I have chosen two articles to engage with at length, thus completely bypassing the work of Krause (I really liked that one, though, with Pastorals as a mimo-textual Pauline hypertext), Wilson (that one too – I love what he does with gender and the three Marys), Pippin (am still haunted by it and thinking of lambs, God, Jesus and consensual cannibalism), Pyper (emphasises the imagination in the reader as a child or what the child reads or how the biblical text is a parent) and Black (gender patterns in Song of Songs); and only vaguely deploying that of Boer (leaving out the awful jokes). After finishing Tina Pippin’s article on vampires and the bread of life discourse in John, I turned to the next in the volume: James Smith’s article ‘Outside In: Diabolical portraits’. Compared to Pippin’s, which was brief, provocative and to the point, Smith’s is 40 pages long, with different fonts and a number of illustrations. Admittedly, I groaned inwardly at the length but forced myself to get going. After I finished, I resolved to hunt down whatever else he had written, as soon as I came within 5 metres of an internet connection. Smith masterfully weaves in and out of childhood memories, issues of belonging, as well as writing an article on autobiographical criticism using the devil as the red thread. Smith has inserted a dialogue between the scholar Jamie and his demon, Esbeelbezub into childhood memories of growing up with the devil, his brother’s suicide, analyses of Simpson episodes, and various evangelical Christian engagements with the devil. The dialogue discusses the prolegomena to this article, such as some of the problems BOOK REVIEW