Autumn 2009

Down to Earth: The Fall in Modern Literature
Corpus Christi College, Oxford

‘Our beginning is neither at the creation of the world, which could make of us God’s continuers, nor in Eden, where our art would be the Word of the universe, the voice of creation responding to its Creator, but rather in the Fall of man, whether that also be an event in history or simply a manifest fact of the human condition. For us, it is the cherubim with flaming swords that have invented art.’ Michael Edwards, ‘Lunar Shadows: Reflections on Literary Creation’ (from Ombres de lune: réflexions sur la création littéraire, Paris, 2001) in The Glass No 19, p. 6.
‘Without the Fall, or some other explanation which we must suppose for our unhappiness, we would not continuously have this desire to re-invent the earth, to invent times and places, narratives, events, characters other than those of life outside literature, to prize the difference writing makes between the world and the book.’ Ibid., p. 11

Keynote paper:
After the Garden: Re-imagining the Fall in Contemporary Fiction
Dr Andrew Tate
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University

Andrew Tate considered David Maine's novels The Flood (2004) and Fallen (2005), Philip Pullman's re-writing of Paradise Lost in His Dark Materials and other recent fiction against the background of discussions by (amongst others) Michael Edwards (Towards a Christian Poetics) and Valentine Cunningham (Reading After Theory).

Other Papers
‘The Encounter of the Fallen and Un-Fallen Worlds in the Poetic Fiction of C.S.Lewis’
Dr Anna Walczuk, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

‘Wordsworth's fallen language'
Jessica Fay, University of Liverpool

‘Tolkien: Legends of The Fall’
Barry Livingstone

‘Eviction from Eden: the Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen’
Dr Nicola Darwood, University of Bedfordshire

Reading
Alan Jacobs, Original Sin: a Cultural History, 2008
David Jasper and Stephen Prickett (eds.), The Bible and Literature: A Reader, 1999.
Rebecca Lemon (ed.), Blackwell Companion to the Bible in Literature, 2009
C.S. Lewis, Perelandra,1943
Eric Smith, Some Versions of the Fall: The Myth of the Fall of Man in English Literature, 1973
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, 1999.

Full programme

These papers and a number of book reviews appear in The Glass No 22, Spring 2010.

Christian Literary Studies Group: in association with the Universities & Colleges Christian Fellowship

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