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"A Rare and Wonderful Sight"

其他書名	Secularism and Visual Historiography in Ben-Hur
出版	University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=0o0JjwEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋"Late in Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), the narrator addresses his reader to say that the dense passages of historical and geographical detail that characterize the novel were all written, “in anticipation of this hour and this scene; so that he who has read them with attention can now see all Ben-Hur saw of going to the crucifixion—a rare and wonderful sight.” This is the narrative theory of Ben-Hur, and, I argue, an innovative hybrid of historical, theological, and literary perspectives on narrative authority. The effective novelist, like the effective evangelist and the effective historian, enables his reader to see the past. In this essay, I turn to the numerous meta-historiographical passages scattered throughout Wallace’s novel in order to suggest that Ben-Hur is a long argument for a kind of visual historiography, bolstered by archival research but rooted in the transhistorical figure of the eyewitness. Comparing Wallace’s work with that of the historian William Prescott, Holy Land travel writers Edward Robinson and John Lloyd Stephens, as well as Jesus biographer Ernest Renan, I argue that Ben-Hur’s highly visualized narrative provides a unique opportunity to witness the overlap between sacred and secular discourses."--