The Karaites emerged as a "school of thought" within Middle Eastern Judaism in the 8th century. The Karaites were a "reading community" whose intellectual activity and daily lives were based around the divine scriptures. Over time Karaism became one of the two main competing schools of Judaism in the medieval Arab-Islamic world, notably across Iran, Iraq, the Levant and Egypt. Whilst Rabbinate Judaism emphasised the oral law of the Talmud/Midrash, Karaite Judaism focused on the written law. Much of Karaite classical scholarship remains inaccessible because it is still in manuscript form and because it has been and still is considered peripheral and sectarian. This volume presents a critical edition of an anonymous Karaite commentary on the Book of Jeremiah presented in both the original Arabic and in English translation. The volume uses this text to examine the commonalities and differences between the Rabbinate and the Karaite reception and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible.
A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid presents a series of essays revealing the rich diversity and vitality of critical engagement with Ovid's poetry taking place from antiquity to the present day. Featuring contributions from more than 30 leading experts, readings Cover a broad sweep of Ovidian reception while addressing the celebrated Roman poet's manifold impact on literature, art, music, and film over the past two millennia.
Of all the great novelists of the Romantic period, only two, Jane Austen and Walter Scott, have been continuously reprinted, admired, argued about, and read, from the moment their works first appeared until the present day. In a pioneering study, Annika Bautz traces how Scott's nineteenth-century success among all classes of readers made him the most admired and most widely read novelist in history, only for his readership to plummet sharply downwards in the twentieth century. Austen's popularity, by contrast, has risen inexorably, overtaking Scott's, and bringing about a reversal in reputation that would have been unthinkable in the authors' own time.
To assess the reactions of readers belonging to diverse interpretative communities, Bautz draws on a wide range of indicators, including editions, publisher's relaunches, sales, reviews, library catalogues and lending figures, private comments in diaries and letters, popularisations. She maps out the long-run changes in the reception of each author over two centuries, explaining literary tastes and their determinants, and illuminating the broader culture of the successive reading audiences who gave both authors their uninterrupted loyalty.
The first ever comparative longitudinal study, firmly based on empirical and archival evidence, this book will be of interest to scholars in Romanticism, Victorianism, book history, reading and reception studies, and cultural history.
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