This groundbreaking study focuses on the reconfiguring of the character of the Prodigal Son and his family as they appear in drama, novels, and poetry in English from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

• 1: Reading the Prodigal Son


• 2: The Prodigal Son in Elizabethan Literature


• 3: The Prodigal Son and Shakespeare


• 4: Female Victorian Novelists and the Prodigal Son


• 5: The American Short Story and the Prodigal Son


• 6: Prodigal Ministers in Fiction


• 7: The Prodigal Son in Poetry: Elizabeth Bishop and Iain Crichton Smith


• 8: Conclusion


• Bibliography

Alison M. Jack is Senior lecturer in Bible and Literature at the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. Her publications include Texts Reading Texts, Sacred and Secular: Two Postmodern Perspectives (1999), Scottish Fiction as Gospel Exegesis: Four Case Studies (2010), and The Bible and Literature (2012).