In Competition No. 2736 you were invited to submit bible stories as retold by modern authors.
There were plenty of eager contenders, and unsurprisingly so. Works of heavyweight literary scholarship have documented the all-pervasive influence of the King James Bible on British and American literature. The rhythms of its language are clearly discernible in the work of writers as diverse as Wodehouse, Hemingway and Kipling, who mined not only its style but its content too. Kipling’s phrase ‘dark places of the earth’ (from Psalm 74:20) is also borrowed by Conrad in Heart of Darkness.
You clearly had great fun with this assignment, letting the likes of Jilly Cooper, Irvine Welsh and J.K. Rowling loose on Sunday School favourites. I was especially entertained by E. Blake’s ‘Samson and Delilah’ as retold by Jackie Collins and by M.E. Ault/Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Cain.
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