Scottish Fiction as Gospel Exegesis: Four Case Studies

The relationship between the Bible and literature continues to fascinate many scholars working in both fields. In this book, as the Gospels and the work of four Scottish writers are read together, their correspondences become manifest. The four writers, James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mrs Oliphant and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, offer distinctive and accessible readings of the Gospels. Bringing the biblical texts and the work of these writers into conversation with one another highlights the changing ways the Bible influenced the fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Alison Jack shows that these novels function as exegeses of Gospel texts and ideas. What is offered here is not a simple noting of biblical allusions, but a narrative exploration of Gospel themes, ideas and stories, such as the Parable of the Prodigal Son, as they are woven through the content and form of the novels discussed, among them Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae. This weaving is never untouched by the influence of Calvinism on the imagination of these Scottish writers; but the influence, informed by the polymorphism of gospel discourse, is often surprising and certainly not static.

This book offers an insight into a shifting literary world that will be of interest to biblical critics working on the reception history of the Gospels and to scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scottish literature, as well as to general readers who want to explore the hermeneutical issues raised by reading the Bible and literature together.