ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book summarizes the overall story told in Bible. It explains how Bible can be understood as a collection of texts that were originally created separately but were later compiled into a single book. The book then explores a set of related texts from the Bible, selecting those texts according to shared themes: otherworldly stories that cannot be told fully or clearly; stories about intimate relationships; stories about what happens when those relationships get betrayed and broken; and stories about how such relationships get restored and recreated. It also focuses on two of the most widely known authors— William Shakespeare and J. K. Rowling. While the Bible's formal qualities had been influencing authors for centuries, nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed a significant number of literary works that evince primarily formal rather than thematic biblical influences. The book also focuses on these formal influences.
