From Around the Globe

From Around the Globe features twenty-six essays from international scholars across various disciplines who explore a broad range of contemporary and cutting-edge connections between the Bible and global literature. The scholars' fields of study range from classical western literature to multicultural tracts, including a broad variety of literary genres. The scholars use their treatments of literature, criticism, and the Bible to analyze connections among them from a global perspective.

Many writers from industrialized nations and the developing world have employed the Bible as an analogue, or have drawn allusions from it to compose their prose, poetry, drama, and other documents. Most often, these authors draw clear references to biblical matter. Other authors are more guarded and camouflaged. Some non-western writers might even be unaware of the allusions they generate, and western writers, while delving into allegorical shadows, may unwittingly layer in biblical references to their works. This collection engages in a reassessment of authors' biblical references, intentional or unintentional.

Seodial Frank H. Deena is Professor of Multicultural and Postcolonial Literature and Criticism at East Carolina University where he coordinates the Graduate Multicultural Literature Program. He teaches multicultural, world, postcolonial, African American, and Caribbean literature, as well as the Bible as literature. He received his Ph.D. in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and his undergraduate degree from the University of Guyana. His previous works include, Canonization, Colonization, Decolonization: A Comparative Study of Political and Critical Works By Minority Writers, and Situating Caribbean Literature and Criticism in Multicultural and Postcolonial Studies, is forthcoming in 2007.

Karoline Szatek is a Shakespeare and early modern scholar, visiting professor, and contributing editor to The Shakespeare Newsletter. Szatek, who received her Ph.D. in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, teaches Shakespeare and other early modern literature at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Her book, The Discourse of Space in Early Modern Pastoral Drama, is forthcoming.