1 Chronicles

John Jarick reads Chronicles as fantasy literature that creates an imaginary world with the didactic purpose of inculcating a particular view of everyday life, bombarding the reader with a kaleidoscopic progression of heroes and villains and presenting a frontier land of danger and opportunity. A focus on the literary world of Chronicles provides a fresh reading of the book, in which the patterns of the presentation (including a musical language) can more readily be seen and appreciated, even as the dark underbelly of the writing (including a disturbing ideology) is also exposed and repudiated.