Reading Esther

In this original interpretation of the story of Esther, Kenneth Craig offers to interpreters a new context for reading this often undervalued and misunderstood story. According to Craig, this story has been undervalued and misunderstood because its true genre, the literary carnivalesque, has not been considered. The defining image of the literary carnivalesque is the festival itself, whose atmosphere sets the tone, shapes the plot, and defines the images of the story. An integral aspect of this genre is the pairing of opposites and reversals, culminating in a literature that has its own peculiar kind of logic, a world of shifts, and "inside outs," and "turnabouts." Craig defines the book of Esther as the story of such reversals: Haman ends up on the gallows that he had built for Mordecai; and Esther emerges as the hero in this male-dominated narrative world. This book will shine a new light on the book of Esther as it offers to readers a new appreciation of the story's genre as a basis of interpretation.