Since it was first published nearly three decades ago, The Art of Biblical Narrative has radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. Renowned critic and translator Robert Alter presents the Hebrew Bible as a cohesive literary work, one whose many authors used innovative devices such as parallelism, contrastive dialogue, and narrative tempo to tell one of the most revolutionary stories of human history: the revelation of a single god.

The Art of Biblical Narrative

Religion & Spirituality

Alter, Robert

Judaism

HarperCollins Publishers, Ltd

Hebrew and Modernity

Eleven essays exploring the Hebrew literature that existed in Europe before Zionism and that made both Zionism and the Hebrew culture of Israel possible.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Indiana Univ. Press

Indiana University Press

The bible is a literary masterpiece. Increasingly, literary scholars as well as general readers have joined the ranks of the religious orthodox in reading it. Robert Alter, long in this movement's vanguard, reflects on the paradoxes inherent in considering this great religious work as literature. This book builds on, & in some cases takes issue with, the new wave of literary & bibilical studies to reexamine the elusive, endlessly fascinating texts that have nourished our culture for millenia. While most other books, including Alter's own earlier work, have been devoted to an analysis of the formal poetry & narrative properties of biblical literature, in this book Alter steps back from the analytical catagories to reflect on the general nature of biblical literature. How is one to account for the presence of an impulse as playful & as potentially subversive as literary creation in a body of texts so dedicated to religious purposes? What is the relation between literary imagination & religious values in the bible? In what ways is the bible distinctive as a body of literature. Are there lines of continuity between biblical literature & literature written later & elsewhere? In grappling with these questions, Alter draws on specific examples to make the theoretical issues concretely intelligible.

The World of Biblical Literature

SPCK Publishing

The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism (Samuel and Athea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies)

Univ of Washington Pr

Approaching the debates about literary canon from an entirely new angle, a foremost literary critic explores how a range of iconoclastic twentieth-century authors (in particular Kafka, Bialik, and Joyce) have put to use the paramount canonical text--the Hebrew Bible. Robert Alter argues against the notion that the canon is a vehicle of ideological enforcement and shows instead that canons are by nature surprisingly elastic and enabling for later writers

Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series)

Yale University Press

In Imagined Cities,Robert Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centers from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. As new technologies and arrangements of public and private space changed the ways people experienced time and space, the urban panorama became less coherent—a metropolis defying traditional representation and definition, a vast jumble of shifting fragments and glimpses—and writers were compelled to create new methods for conveying the experience of the city.In a series of subtle and convincing interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Bely, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka, Alter reveals the ways the city entered the literary imagination. He shows how writers of diverse imaginative temperaments developed innovative techniques to represent shifts in modern consciousness. Writers sought more than a journalistic representation of city living, he argues, and to convey meaningfully the reality of the metropolis, the city had to be re-created or reimagined. His book probes the literary response to changing realities of the period and contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of the Western imagination.

Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel

Contemporary

In this illuminating book, one of our foremost literary critics views the much-debated question of the literary canon from an entirely new angle. Robert Alter explores the ways in which a range of iconoclastic twentieth-century authors have put to use the stories, language, and imagery of the paramount canonical text-the Hebrew Bible. Alter makes a compelling case against the prevalent, pejorative notion of the canon as a vehicle of ideological enforcement. He shows instead that canons by nature are surprisingly elastic, providing later writers with imaginative resources even when those same writers rebel against what they conceive as the constraints of the canon. Focusing special attention on Franz Kafka's Amerika, Haim Nahman Bialik's The Dead of the Desert, and James Joyce's Ulysses, Alter brings to bear an unusual perspective, putting into a single frame of discussion three writers from widely different linguistic traditions (German, Hebrew, English) and from disparate cultural settings (Prague, Odessa, Dublin). Alter's close readings of these major modern writers reveal how reference to canonical antecedents can be both surprisingly various and enabling. Examining the diverse modes in which Biblical material becomes interwoven with the fabric of a new work, he also offers new insights into the nature and range of modernism. Critically appreciative rather than polemic in tone, Alter conveys in this thoughtful book a renewed sense of the vitality of literary modernism.

An intimate portrait illuminating the life and work of Amos Oz, the award-winning Israeli writer and activist &nbsp; Amos Oz (1939-2018) was one of Israel's most prolific and prominent writers, as well as a regular contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was the author of dozens of novels, essay collections, and novellas written between 1965 and shortly before his death. &nbsp; In this first published biography of Oz, the celebrated translator, literary critic, and biblical scholar Robert Alter explores Oz's relationship with his family, beginning with the suicide of his mother, Fania Klausner, when he was twelve years old, and goes on to review his time in Kibbutz Hulda, which he entered at fourteen following his separation from his father, Arieh Klausner; his family's right-wing Zionism; his writing career; his activism in support of a pluralistic Israel; and his work as an international lecturer. &nbsp; In examining Oz's life and work, Alter brings together testimony from Oz and his circle, as well as close readings of his central works, to present the inner world and public persona of Amos Oz.

Amos Oz: Writer, Activist, Icon (Jewish Lives)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

A brilliant new translation and commentary of one of the Bible's most cherished and powerful books. Like the Five Books of Moses a cornerstone of the scriptural canon, the Book of Psalms has been a source of solace and joy for countless readers over millennia. The cleansing purity of its images invites reflection and supplication in times of sorrow. The musicality of its powerful rhythms moves readers to celebration of good tidings. So today as it has been throughout our past, this is a book to be cherished as the grounding for our daily lives.This timeless poetry is beautifully wrought by a scholar whose translation of the Five Books of Moses was hailed as a "godsend" by Seamus Heaney and a "masterpiece" by Robert Fagles. Robert Alter's The Book of Psalms captures the simplicity, the physicality, and the coiled rhythmic power of the Hebrew, restoring the remarkable eloquence of these ancient poems. His learned and insightful commentary shines a light on the obscurities of the text.

The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary

W.W.Norton&Company

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alter, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Alter, Robert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alter, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Art of Biblical Narrative

Hebrew and Modernity

Hebrew and Modernity

The World of Biblical Literature

The Invention of Hebrew Prose: Modern Fiction and the Language of Realism (Samuel and Athea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies)

Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series)

Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel

Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series)

Amos Oz: Writer, Activist, Icon (Jewish Lives)

The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary