New book: Stein, Textual Mirrors

NEW BOOK:

Textual Mirrors
Reflexivity, Midrash, and the Rabbinic Self
Dina Stein

248 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth Aug 2012 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4436-6 | $79.95s | £52.00 |

Textual Mirrors draws on literary theory, folklore studies, and semiotics to examine stories in which self-reflexivity operates particularly strongly to constitute rabbinic identity through the voices of Simon the Just and a handsome shepherd, the daughter of Asher, the Queen of Sheba, and an unnamed maidservant. In Stein's readings, these self-reflexive stories allow us to go through the looking glass: where the text comments upon itself, it both compromises the unity of its underlying principles—textual, religious, and ideological—and confirms it.

Via the Talmud Blog on Facebook.