Fall Narratives: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Throughout history the motif of ‘the Fall’ has impacted upon our understanding of theology and philosophy and has had an influence on everything from literature to dance. Fall Narratives brings together theologians, historians and artists as well as philosophers and scholars of religion and literature, to explore and reflect on a wide range of concepts of the Fall. Bringing a fresh understanding of the nuanced meanings of the Fall and its various manifestations over time and across space, contributions reflect on the ways in which the Fall can be seen as a transition into absence; how conceptions of the Fall relate to, change, and shape one another; and how the Fall can be seen positively, embracing as it does a narrative of hope.

Table of Contents:
Part I Body and Space: Physical and Figurative Falls The Italic I EMMA COCKER and CLARE THORNTON Hell and Paradise for Milton: Physical Places and States of Mind ROBERT SEGAL Culture as Escape from the Curse: Jacques Ellul on the Fall BRIAN BROCK Part II Fall as Absence The Fall According to Classical Stoic Thought ERLEND MACGILLIVRAY Thomas Traherne’s Theological Poetics of the Fall ELIZABETH S. DODD The Doctrine of the Fall in Seventeenth-Century Reformed Scholasticism: Philosophy Between Faith and Scepticism GIOVANNI GELLERA ‘Nusiel Unbound’: The Archangel and the Fall in Unification Thought LUKAS POKORNY Part III Intertextual Falls: Across Time and Texts Falling Masonry and the Redemption of Public Speech: Reading Milton Through Hannah Arendt HELEN LYNCH Language and the Fall in W. B. Yeats and Geoffrey Hill KARL O’HANLON When Roth Reads Milton: The Fall Between Paradise Lost and American Pastoral DAVID CURRELL The Fox and the Fall: Vulpine Associations with Heresy, the Devil and Eden’s Serpent ERIC ZIOLKOWSKI Beyond the Blue Lagoon: Some Popular Reflections of the Fall BRIAN MURDOCH Part IV Fall as Ascent ‘Name Him ‘Abd al-Ḥārith’: Eve’s Fall from Monotheism, and Ascent into Motherhood ZOHAR HADROMI-ALLOUCHE Fall as Ascent: The Exegesis of Gen 3-4 and 6:1-4 in the Apocryphon of John JUTTA LEONHARDT-BALZER Narrative Normativity: Four Routes to Redemption EMILY CADDICK BOURNE and CRAIG BOURNE

About the Author :
Zohar Hadromi-Allouche is Lecturer in Islamic Studies in the department of Divinity and Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen. In her research she applies a literary approach to Islamic religious sources, as a way of revealing literary paradigms and motifs, as well as inter-cultural transitions and transformations, in Islamic religious literature. Dr Hadromi-Allouche's recent works deal with prophecy and science, Islamic demonology and Islamic fall stories. She is currently focusing on the image of Eve and its various aspects in the Muslim tradition. Áine Larkin is Lecturer in French at the University of Aberdeen, and author of Proust Writing Photography: Fixing the Fugitive in ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (Oxford: Legenda, 2011). A graduate of Trinity College, Dublin and the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris III, in 2008 she was awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Together with text/image relations and Proust studies, her research interests include literature and medicine, the literary representation of music and dance, and contemporary women’s writing in French.