Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture by Robert Alter

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.