Strained Breath and Open Text: Exploring the Materiality of Breath in Relation to Reading Luke 4:16–30

This article explores the materiality of breath as a way of engaging with the materiality of a text against a contemporary background where air and atmosphere are often strained. It offers a reading of Luke 4:16–30 from the perspective of the interlinked materialities of breath, text, and women’s lives, arguing for a multilayered approach to reading that attends to the markers of breath in the reader, the ways the text affects both the reader’s and the characters’ breath, and the way the text might speak into the strained breath of a climate change and pollution affected Earth.