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Over six hundred years before John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Anglo-Saxon authors told their own version of the fall of the angels. This book brings together various cultural moments, literary genres, and relevant comparanda to recover that story, from the legal and social world to the realm of popular spiritual ritual and belief. The story of the fall of the angels in Anglo-Saxon England is the story of a successfully transmitted exegetical teaching turned rich literary tradition that can be traced through a diverse range of genres: sermons, saints’ lives, royal charters, riddles, as well as devotional and biblical poetry, each genre offering a distinct window into the ancient myth’s place within the Anglo-Saxon literary and cultural imagination.
4 Dark angels: Blake, Milton, and Lovecraft in Ridley Scott's Prometheus Jason Whittaker William Blake has frequently been an influence (if sometimes an oblique one) in Ridley Scott's films since at least the release of Blade Runner in 1982, most notably in Roy Batty's misquotation of the lines from America a Prophecy : ‘Fiery the angels fell; deep thunder rolled
As a gothic iteration of Ovid‘s Pygmalion myth, the television show ‘Dark Angel’ demonstrates how anxiety over the laboratory creation of people persists in popular culture. The paper looks through the lenses of media representation of cloning, complexity theory‘s trope of iteration, and gothic literary criticism, first to analyze Dark Angels heroine as a gothic version of Pygmalion‘s statue. It goes on to explore some of the implications of rewriting sculptor/lover Pygmalion into Dark Angels Donald Lydecker and Logan Cale, before examining the first season in its entirety. The analysis ends on a short exploration of some interactions between the show and the popular culture that produces and consumes it.
Moving from the role of the fall of the angels narrative within specific Anglo-Saxon historical and cultural moments, this chapter focuses on the uses of the narrative in the context of hagiographical poetry in relation to issues of martyrdom, conversion, apostleship, and salvation. As discussed previously, the connection between corrupt religious houses and heavenly discord was probably a very old one, part of a longer tradition extending all the way back to Bede’s eighth-century Epistola ad Ecgbertum . Nevertheless, at least one Anglo-Saxon author rejected
4 Angels and demons: the mental world of an eighteenth-century Anglican pastor Examinations of Hutchinson’s life and oeuvre have veered more towards the perfunctory than the systematic.1 This approach has ensured that Hutchinson’s intellectual, political and religious views have been sketched out only in broad brush strokes by historians. Part of this lacuna in the historiography has been filled in previous chapters by examining Hutchinson’s particular brand of churchmanship and party politics. This chapter will continue in this vein by examining his view on
An Ascending Angel , by the Edinburgh-born Richard Cooper (1740– c .1814), is a drawing from the late eighteenth or the early nineteenth century ( Figure 6.1 ). It shows a winged female angel rising in a mass of billowing robes above a half-sketched landscape. The angel is tilted backwards, arms outstretched, breasts bare. Her pose is vulnerable, and she looks rather alarmed by her own ascent. This was a conception of angelic forces that emphasised softness and femininity. Robert Burns (1759–96) probably had a similar vision in mind in 1787 when he termed his
In an age of Imperial confidence, the social rhetoric of Victorian Britain frequently manifested a perceptible unease when considering cultural problems within the home nation. The imagery of ‘darkest England’, dependant as it was upon a powerful colonialist discourse, authorised and transmitted a register of language whereby an internal Other might be configured as uncivilised, and thus capable of being subject to the explorer and the missionary. Much, of course, has already been written upon the Gothic possibilities of this phenomena which characterised an Imperial age which allegedly declined with the nineteenth century. No similar consideration, however, has yet been made of its continuation into the twentieth century, a progressively post-colonial era in which the Imperial (or Imperialised) Other, in consequence, functions differently. This article considers two Gothic short stories, one in a reprinted Edwardian collection, the other a component of an original collection, both of which were issued in volume form in the late 1940s. The two narratives examine classic ‘cultures-within-cultures’, pockets of resistance within the fabric of the Imperial nation, though in a cultural context radically different from their Victorian predecessors. Algernon Blackwood‘s ‘Ancient Sorceries’ (1908), published in the 1947 reprint of his John Silence, and L.T.C. Rolt‘s ‘Cwm Garon’ published in Sleep No More (1948) share a preoccupation with the casual, localised, travelling which has replaced Imperial adventure, and with the decline of identifiable Christian institutions and landmarks themselves the products of earlier missionary activity in a familiar, though threatening, European landscape. In both short stories a form of devil worship is enacted before the eyes of the traveller, and in a landscape which fascinates and somehow holds him. In ‘Ancient Sorceries’, where the Devil does attend the bacchanal, the protagonist is almost seduced into willing participation but, on evading the sexual lure of the sabbat, vows never to return. Rolt, writing after the recent horrors of the Second World War, discards the presiding Devil in favour of a mortal substitute, but still leaves open the possibility that, in Kilvert‘s words, ‘an angel satyr walks these hills’. Neither welcomed nor seduced by the satanic community, Rolts protagonist finds himself fascinated by the land, and thus drawn into unwilling participation. In colonial terms, these two narratives explore the frequently rehearsed dangers of ‘going native’ that lie at the core of, among other works, Kipling‘s ‘The Mark of the Beast’, Rider Haggard‘s She and Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness. A subject people is identified, but their strength either supernatural or merely cultural, the ability to preserve a distinctive and resistant way of life tests the limits of the perceiving power. These are, in a sense, Imperial fantasies for a post-colonial world, a reflexing of colonised culture back in upon the formerly colonising nation.
to offer comfort in the daily battle against doubt and anxiety. He may have arrived to take the angel’s part but he was also trained in suiting his imagery to the immediate situation, and angelic agency and how he offers it up to his English readers is a case in point; Gabriel could come as himself to a Virgin freely submissive to the will of God, but Raphael had to bring help in disguise. Angels were on the front line
4 Angels and devils: embodiment and adolescence in recent Spanish films The proposition that the category ‘“youth” stands in for a crisis in the public sphere’ (Smith, 2006: 75) seems to be borne out in Spain by the ‘Generación Ni Ni’ (The Neither-Nor Generation) who neither work nor study and who encapsulate the ‘lost’ generation unable to support themselves as a result of the current financial crisis. Whilst some find that this label casts them as the disaffected youth, others agree with the suggestion that it relieves them at least partially of the
1 Bright as an angel Much of what we know about Logue’s early life and career can be found in the loose-leaf typed and handwritten pages of an unpublished biography compiled by Patrick Toner, former Professor of Theology at Maynooth and co-founder of the Irish Theological Quarterly. The work was commissioned by Logue’s successor as Archbishop of Armagh, Patrick O’Donnell, and was intended to provide a hagiography of the late cardinal, though it was never completed. Most of the information is apocryphal, the result of a public appeal by Toner for letters