ABSTRACT |
This article follows the tradition of critical authors such as Eugene
Genovese and Jenny Sharpe, who study intercultural relationships in
English. That is so because, in “On how Yahweh disapproves of
intercourse between different peoples”, just as in the works of the a.m.
literary investigators, miscegenation, more than based upon actual
history, is seen as having its foundations in a textual corpus which has
been handed down from one generation to the next. In a parallel way,
this article follows the tradition of biblical investigators such as
John Gabel, in the sense that it analyses the Bible from the viewpoint
that it is one of the books which has exerted the greatest influence on
English literary works of the kind of A Passage to India (1924)
or The Raj Quartet (1976). The idea behind the whole article is
that the biblical repetition of narratives where affairs between peoples
of a different race or culture were punished by God may have pierced the
unconscious of English literature. After listening to such stories as
those of the city-dweller of Gib’e-ah, Lot or Abraham, those cultivated
authors of subsequent centuries, who were to write texts on the white
man’s encounter with other peoples in far away lands, could do nothing
but find miscegenation immoral and ill-fated.
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