Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The “Outsider”: Neil Gaiman and the Old Testament

2011; Purdue University Press; Volume: 29; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sho.2011.0051

1534-5165

Cyril Camus,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Neil Gaiman’s educational environment was divided between Jewish family and Anglican schooling. Raised up as a cultural outsider, he has cultivated his detached outlook, moving from England to the United States and depicting the latter from a British perspective in Sandman and American Gods . His cheerful embracement of the position of the “alien” also shows in his use and rewritings of the foundational Judaic text, the Old Testament, in the six scripts he contributed for the British comics-anthology of theological satire Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament (Knockabout, 1987), and in his comics-series Sandman (DC, 1988–1996), where the explicit linking of DC characters to their biblical roots, and the use of Midrashic references, operate as a resacralization that counterbalance the desacralization at the core of Outrageous Tales .