Narrating Biblical Orients: Genre, Gender, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Old Testament Narrative Poetry

This project analyzes a group of eighteenth-century poems, for the first time, as a cohesive genre. These poems are identified by a consistent set of shared characteristics: each uses a narrative from the Hebrew Scriptures as a source text, is written by a woman in eighteenth-century Britain, and sutures together literary modes, and image archives, especially depictions of and literary modes from the East. Recognizing this collection of poems as an important sub-genre deepens and clarifies our understanding of the broader literary landscape in the period, specifically about the permeability of genre in this century and the ways that eighteenth-century writers were imagining and deploying images of the ancient eastern world to grapple with their evolving identities. Three chapters trace the development of the oriental mode, especially concentrating on the prominence of self-conscious narration, the relationship between public and private forms of power, and the use of sentiment. The first establishes Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s The History of Joseph (1737) as the paradigmatic poem of the genre, with Anne Finch’s “Poor Man’s Lamb” (1713) serving as a second case study. These poems share an emphasis on the efficacy of narrative and the inextricability of public and private, and they each capitalize on nascent tropes of Orientalism to encourage certain kinds of moral behavior. The second chapter shows how the oriental mode unfolds at mid-century, especially its use of the tyrant figure to invite readers into deeper engagement with Scripture and at the same time call attention to power imbalances; it also examines how these poems participate in the tradition of sentimental literature. The final chapter focuses on late examples of the Old Testament narrative poem, which spotlight a morally dubious character, though the poems continue to affirm personal and collective morality, and connects Old Testament narrative poems with theater trends.