Kathleen Biddick

At 104 pages of body text, way too short. A conclusion, wrap up, epilogue: whatever it would be called, some final material would have been very welcome. Biddick at times just gestures towards material in a handful of sentences that could have been treated at much more length (see the reference to André Aciman), and she never quite demonstrates that the logic of supersession in historiography is particularly a Christian logic of antiJudaism. It's not, certainly, and it's not, not even in this book, as she demonstrates that Amitav Ghosh renders Islam the superseded past of Indian Hinduism; but Christianity perhaps develops the most sophisticated, thorough, and influential version supersession, one that continues its force, through Freud, Foucault, and Jameson.

For more, and a good, fair review (ie, not the Pegg review in Speculum 2006), see here… (mere)