Prickett charts the schism, opened at the end of the oighteenth century, between biblical hermeneutics and literary criticism. This split has profound implications for both contemporary biblical translation and literary theory. The author investigates the critical commonplace that religious language is essentially poetic, and traces the development of that view in the writings of Dennis and Vico, Herder and Eichhorn, Ccoleridge and Arld, Wordsworth and Hopkins, and Austin Farrer and Paul Ricouer. This concept continues to provide a termilogy for discussing narrative that can longer be interpreted literally or allegorically, but has also led some critics to devise inadequate translation theories and conceptions of metaphor.