THE GLASS

NUMBER 33 AUTUMN 2020

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year Valentine Cunningham 4

Saints under an empty sky – Time and Space in Camus’s La Peste Marie Kawthar Daouda 10

Good and Evil in Eliot’s Lett ers to Emily Hale Jewel Spears Brooker 19

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit David Jasper 26

Seeking Light: Ruskin after Jesus Andrew Tate 32

Pilgrim Plays for a New Elizabethan Age Margaret Wiedemann Hunt 39

The dramatic transformation of Samson Agonistes Irene Montori 48

‘So They Say’: An Experiment in Reading Curse, Lament and Persona in Psalm 109 Richard S. Briggs 55

Book reviews 62 Roy Flechner, Saint Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland’s Patron Saint Colin McAllister, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature Carolyn Muessig, The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Michael L. Peterson, C. S. Lewis and the Christian Worldview Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

Notes on Contributors 74 News and Notes 76 Published by the Christian Literary Studies Group, a Literary Society in association with the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship. Editorial and subscriptions: The Glass, 10 Dene Road, Northwood, Middlesex HA6 2AA.

CLSG www.clsg.org [email protected] © the contributors 2020 ISSN 0269-770X (Print) ISSN 2515-3307 (Online) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitt ed in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. The views of the contributors do not necessarily refl ect editorial stance. The CLSG holds personal details on computer for the purpose of mailing in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018. Good and Evil in Eliot’s Letters to Emily Hale Jewel Spears Brooker

. S. Eliot arrived in Boston on his forty-fourth birthday, ₂₆ September ₁₉₃₂, to begin an academic year at Harvard. He had gone to England in 1914 to study at TOxford and now, in response to an invitation to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, he was returning to his alma mater as a celebrated poet and critic. In addition to a commitment to give the Norton Lectures (published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism), he agreed to teach a course in English literature and to crisscross America from Baltimore to Los Angeles and Chicago to Charlott esville for readings and speeches. In November and December, he gave four Norton lectures, initiating a hectic schedule that found him at year’s end in California where he gave talks at Scripps College, UCLA, and Berkeley. In January 1933, on the way back to Boston, he paused for lectures in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, and Buff alo. The feverish round continued throughout the spring, highlighted by three remaining Norton Lectures, the Turnbull Lectures at Johns Hopkins, the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, and twice-weekly lectures to students at Harvard. Before leaving England, Eliot told Emily Hale, a Bostonian teacher and actress he had known at least since 1912, that he was eager to return to America and to re- connect with his family, a longing alleviated by visits with siblings and cousins in Boston and other cities.1 In St. Louis, he visited his Aunt Rose (Mrs. Holmes Smith) and the graves of his parents, and lectured at Washington University, where he was feted as the grandson of its founder. At the same time, and in spite of the fact that for over a year he had been writing love lett ers to her, he told Emily Hale that he was reluctant to see her and nudged her to leave Boston for a position at Scripps College in California. In late December 1932 and early January 1933, he spent a few days with her at Scripps, lectured to her students, and att ended church services. The lett ers that he wrote following this brief rendez-vous are among the most revealing in the Emily Hale archive. The essential context is the confl uence of his visit with Hale in California, his encounter with familial ghosts in St. Louis, and his refl ections on the texts he was teaching in ‘English 26’ at Harvard. This convergence forced him to deal with irreconcilable diff erences between Unitarianism (the faith of his family and Miss Hale) and the Anglo-Catholicism he had embraced in 1927. Chief among these, addressed in both his lett ers and his lectures, was a diff erent understanding of the nature of good and evil. Eliot began teaching English 26 a week or so after returning to Boston. The class, in which he was assisted by Professor Theodore Spencer, met twice a week from 7 February to 4 May 1933.2 On 7 March, in lectures on Conrad and James, he discussed 1 In a 1960 retrospective, Eliot says that he fell in love with Emily Hale (1891-1969) two years before leaving for graduate study in Europe. Following his joyless marriage in 1915, he cultivated a reminiscent longing for Miss Hale which unbeknownst to her inspired some of his greatest poems, notably Ash-Wednesday, and played a role in his conversion. He revealed his love to her in 1930, and over the next two decades, sent her over one thousand lett ers. In 1956, Hale placed his lett ers at Princeton University and stipulated that they should remain sealed for fi fty years after her death. At the end of his life Eliot destroyed her lett ers to him. The lett ers from Eliot to Hale were opened to the public on 2 January, 2020. Emily Hale Lett ers from T. S. Eliot; Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 2 At the end of the course, Eliot gave his lecture notes and outlines to Spencer. Spencer in turn 19 THE GLASS the brilliance with which ‘Real Evil’ was evoked in Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw.3 ‘Real Evil is much more than an Act; . . . [it] is to Bad as Saintliness and Heroism to Decent Behaviour’ (Prose 4.773). It is not the participation in native rites by Kurtz or the use of vile language by Miles at school that is disturbing, but rather, the suggestion that both characters are in touch with another world, conveyed to the reader by an intersection of natural and supernatural realms of being. Only writers with an ‘exceptional awareness of spiritual reality’ are able to suggest the mystery of evil; only writers with ‘a perception of life as on several planes at once,’ can credibly summon the spirits (Prose 4.773). Eliot is here recalling a 1924 lecture in which he noted that in reading The Brothers Karamazov, one is aware ‘that there are everywhere two planes of reality, and that the scene before our eyes is only the screen and veil of another action which is taking place behind it’ (Prose 2.553). Returning via Conrad to James, Eliot declares: ‘The last word on James: “The Horror! The Horror”’ (Prose 4.771). Two months later, in his lectures in Virginia, he repeats the point, claiming that in the work of Conrad, James, and Sophocles, ‘we are in a world of Good and Evil’ (Prose 5.42). On 6 March (the night before his class on Conrad and James), Eliot wrote to Hale that he had spent the day thinking about The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, and Heart of Darkness, adding that the juxtaposition of Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw had brought to mind an old acquaintance, Matt Prichard.4 Eliot had met the English aesthete and Bergson enthusiast in Paris late in 1910 and recalls that he immediately felt a spiritual aversion to him. He was perhaps the only Evil infl uence that I have ever known; … I have known others … who wanted my body.… But I don’t think I have ever known anybody who wanted my Soul like Matt Prichard.… He wanted to dominate, to possess … as no one I have ever known has wanted to possess a young man’s Soul.5 Eliot then describes his own Conradian experience of ‘The Horror’. He was alone in his boarding room when Prichard appeared and in some unspecifi ed way att empted to ensnare his soul. I just was sure that I had gone over the edge: and I had a vision of hell which I must believe few people ever get: I just hung on, but thinking I was completely gone, blown to pieces. It was going back about fi fty thousand years in evolution, and down into the utt ermost abyss. In twenty seconds or so, ‘it was all over’. Eliot says that the vision vanished and he gave them to Harvard, and they are now printed in volume 4, pages 768-73 of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. 8 vols. Ronald Schuchard (Gen. ed.). Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2014-2019. Subsequent references are identifi ed in text with volume and page number. 3 Here, as in After Strange Gods (lectures given at the University of Virginia at the end of his Harvard class), Eliot capitalises ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ to distinguish moral from behavioral issues. 4 Eliot fi rst mentioned Matt hew Prichard (1865-1936) to Hale on 24 March 1931. Prichard, who lived in Paris from 1908-1914, was known for his Bergsonian aesthetics and his drawings of Romanesque details of architecture in southern France. In 1926, Eliot told Herbert Read that he was ‘in many ways deeply indebted’ to Prichard, a fanatical artist/thinker with a personality ‘so intense that his conversation has an almost hypnotic infl uence.’ The Lett ers of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haff enden, Vol. 3, 1926-1927. London, Faber and Faber, 2012, p.132. 5 Permission to quote from Eliot’s lett ers to Emily Hale was kindly granted by the T. S. Eliot Estate. 20 THE GLASS was certain that he had won. The demon de- fanged, he was able to join Prichard and his brother for a tour of southern France. Eliot recalls that Prichard seemed to have had his own revelation in their stop-over in Limoges, where during the night he heard him ‘moving about in the next room,’ a memory that was to re-surface in ‘Gerontion’ in a scene suggestive of a black mass (‘To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk / Among whispers: by Mr. Silvero / With caressing hands, at Limoges / Who walked all night in the next room’ (ll. 22-25).6 In his several backward glances at his encounter with Prichard, Eliot unfailingly associates Evil with a desire for spiritual domination that is facilitated by an imbalance of power. Other issues raised in Eliot’s discussion of Emily Hale good and evil in the class on Conrad and James are also taken up in the lett ers to Hale. On 7 February, the fi rst day of his course, he discusses the folly of defi ning good and evil as good and bad behaviour. From comments on Hale’s Unitarian clergywoman ‘(What was her name, Miss Blagoon?),’ he moves to his own Unitarian heritage. After visiting the graves of his beloved parents and grandparents in St. Louis, he laments that although they were exceptionally good, ‘naturally good’, natural goodness isn’t enough. On 27 February, he sounds the chord again: people who by conventional standards are considered ‘naturally good’ are merely people with good manners, people who have been ‘well brought up’, people like ‘most of my relatives’. In Minneapolis, Eliot stayed over Sunday to hear his cousin Frederick preach. In the 7 February lett er, he acknowledges that although Frederick is a good preacher, a good clergyman, and a leading citizen, there is something wrong with his thinking. At the risk of being considered a ‘fanatical narrow bigot’ Eliot tells Hale that he prefers Christianity to Frederick’s Unitarianism. Later, in January 1936, he wonders whether even his grandfather, who did so much good for so many in St. Louis, had not built his house upon sand. Eliot’s criticism of his family, as Hale would have understood, was a screen for criticism of her. On 27 February, he is explicit, explaining that he is distressed that she is a Unitarian. He adds that when he goes into the home of Catholics, he knows that he is in communion with them ‘as I am not with Emily: we accept . . . things which to Emily will seem only degraded superstitions.’7 In a contemporaneous (1930) essay on Baudelaire, Eliot underscores the connection between moral understanding and sexuality. ‘Baudelaire perceived that what distinguished the relations of man and woman from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of Good and Evil (of moral Good and Evil, not natural right and wrong)’, (Prose 4.162). The climax of Eliot’s critique of the moral underpinnings of Unitarianism (and, as his brother later reminds him, of his own heritage) occurs in a lecture given on

6 Quotations from Eliot’s poetry are from The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, 2 vols., Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. 7 When criticizing Emily Hale, Eliot usually depersonalises his comments by referring to her, as here, in the third person. 21 THE GLASS

3 April to the Unitarian clergy of Boston.8 Two other areas of overlap between Eliot’s lett ers to Hale and his contemporaneous class lectures are of the essence in following his thinking about the nature of evil. The fi rst, evident in his published poetry and prose, is that there are two planes of being – one natural, the other supernatural – and that both are real. The intersection of these planes, Eliot suggests in the 7 March lecture on Conrad and James, can reveal horror or beatitude. This supposedly impersonal idea did not spring full-grown from the pages of Conrad and James. As revealed in the lett er composed mere hours before his class, Eliot reveals that as a student he had experienced his own Conradian moment – a ‘vision of hell’, a face-to-face with Evil in the person of Matt hew Prichard. In the February lett ers to Hale, Eliot applies the notion of two planes – the temporal and the eternal – to his present situation. In an att empt to encourage Hale to form devotional habits, he explains on 14 February that belief in a higher realm requires more than intellectual assent. ‘It is not until you see and feel and touch that something else is more real, that the other fades.’ To achieve this sensuous apprehension of a higher plane, one must commit to a routine of meditation and prayer. It is in the cultivation of habits of devotion that suddenly one realises that the routine is not merely routine, that ‘the eternal has taken the prior place above the transient.’ By practising spiritual discipline, one gradually learns to live ‘on two planes at once’. And then, in what must have been painful for her to read, he adds that this double vision, this perception of two worlds, is what he appreciates most in the people he meets. This awareness of another world can be seen in the landscapes of his best poems – the stony places of The Waste Land, the pristine gardens of Ash-Wednesday, and the cactus lands of The Hollow Men. It is no accident that one hears the dying whisper of Mistah Kurtz in Eliot’s preferred epigraph to The Waste Land and fi nds him lurking in the kingdoms of death in The Hollow Men.9 And of course, the sudden awareness of other worlds, the momentary peek beyond the river, parallels the perception of the timeless moment in Four Quartets. The second area of overlap between Eliot’s lett ers to Hale and his class lectures is the awareness that human relationships involving an imbalance of power are dangerous. The danger is not physical, but psychological and spiritual and, for the stronger party, fraught with what Eliot refers to in his 6 March lett er as the ‘frightful responsibility’ of infl uence. His several discussions of Evil in the lett ers suggest that conscious att empts to manipulate a weaker party are perilous, with implications of beatitude or damnation. But even in situations where there is no conscious att empt to exert unwarranted infl uence, there is still moral liability. On 6 January 1936, Eliot writes that it is terrifying to think ‘that one may be infl uencing others’ merely by being oneself. Unlike direct assaults, which are demonic, these indirect ones occur primarily through the expansion into malignity of everyday relationships. The relationships that are most susceptible to sliding into the danger zone are those in which there is an inherent and structural imbalance of power, such as those related to age and prestige – teacher/student, priest/penitent, adult/child, male/female (or vice versa), and famous

8 For more details regarding the Boston lecture (‘Two Masters’), followed by Henry Eliot’s rebuke, see Jewel Spears Brooker, T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2018, pp. 150-52. (The book was reviewed in The Glass No. 32, Spring 2020, pp. 63-64.) 9 The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, p. 125. Eliot to Pound: the quotation from Heart of Darkness ‘is much the most appropriate I can fi nd, and somewhat elucidative.’ 22 THE GLASS person/fan or admirer. Eliot’s class discussion of the danger lurking in relationships focuses on two examples, both of which involve the daemonic. In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz and Marlow are bound by an unexpressed pact; in Turn of the Screw, Peter Quint and Miles seem to be similarly bound. In the fi rst, Kurtz is a larger-than-life fi gure with whom Marlow is obsessed, and when they come face to face, Kurtz stamps himself irrevocably on Marlow’s imagination, and Marlow remains, in Conrad’s words, ‘loyal to Kurtz to the last.’10 In the second, Miles is a young orphan who is left for many months in the company of his uncle’s evil valet, Peter Quint. James, as Eliot tells his class, is a master of Evil by suggestion, and the clear suggestion here is that the valet, now deceased, has transplanted his own vile imagination into the child. An understanding of the relationship of Kurtz /Marlow and Peter Quint/Miles is instantly illuminating in Eliot’s startling description of his encounter with Prichard. As a twenty-two year old student newly arrived in France for study abroad, he found himself alone with a sophisticated forty-fi ve year-old scholar and artist – ‘a great man, in his way’, as Eliot tells Emily Hale, but also an Evil Infl uence who was hellbent on spiritual domination. In the paragraph following that in which Eliot describes his 1910 encounter with Prichard, he refl ects on his situation at Harvard in the spring of 1933. He was worried that his twenty year old all-male students, impressed to have an internationally known poet as a teacher, might take him as a model. He comments on students who linger for long talks about literature and frets that his thirty-year old teaching assistant, Theodore Spencer, is ‘terribly susceptible to my infl uence.’ Observing that the young professor is a slightly homosexual man with a wife and child, the forty-fi ve year old poet adds that infl uence can be unintentionally good or evil, but either way, it is a frightful responsibility. As in his account of the encounter with Prichard, his refl ections on these less dramatic relationships are tinged with eroticism (homosexual, given that all parties are male). Eliot’s anxiety about the frightful responsibility of infl uence is most intense in regard to his secret relationship with Emily Hale. His earliest lett ers (1930-1931) are worshipful and full of endearments. Upon learning that he would be spending a year in Boston, Eliot drew back in hurtful ways, and after his week with her in California and for the remainder of his time in America, he peppered his endearments with comments that called his devotion into question. He urges her to go to church, to develop devotional habits, and on 10 February, to meet ‘adult intelligent men,’ adding parenthetically ‘(that is unselfi sh of me, isn’t it?).’ At the same time, he admits on 27 February that his behaviour is unwholesome. ‘I know both the desire to dominate … to infl uence … and the desire to be dominated, to be infl uenced.’ Eliot’s preoccupation with the moral implications of infl uence is evident in a recurring question, posed soon after his return to Boston. On 13 February, he begins his lett er to Hale with ‘I want to know, How You Are … frankly and uncircumspectly, as if I were a doctor or a priest.’ He concludes with a variant of the same question, asking her to say whether his visit has harmed her in any way. The following evening, he dons his sacerdotal robe again and urges her to examine herself and tell him honestly whether his visit had been benefi cial or injurious – more specifi cally, whether he had done ‘spiritual good or damage.’ Not surprisingly, Emily has trouble fi guring out exactly what he is fi shing for. She must have assured him that his visit had been

10 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness [1899], Norton Critical, 3rd ed., New York, 1988, p. 70. 23 THE GLASS

‘helpful,’ for on 2 March, he explains that he was not asking whether his visit had been ‘helpful,’ but ‘whether it had done any harm: either in the way of malice … or internally, spiritually.’ Protesting that she had not thrown the slightest light on either point, he retorts that her response to his question was simply ‘Silly.’ In the face of Eliot’s endless equivocation and occasional scolding, Emily Hale becomes ill and stops writing to him or to her family in Massachusett s. On 17 February, he writes that he is worried about her silence, adding that he assumes that Mrs. Perkins (her aunt) would let him know if there had been a disaster. On 8 March, he reiterates his concern and says he fi nds her silence to be unsett ling. Claiming that he is worrying himself ‘into horrors’ because neither he nor Mrs. Perkins has heard from her, Eliot begs her to write; ‘O my dear even when you can’t write to me, do try to get word to her.’ On 12 March, Mrs. Perkins fi nally receives a telegram with the news that Emily has been ill, with terrible nights and a hacking cough. Alarmed by the telegram, Eliot on 14 March tells her that she cannot imagine how relieved he is to know that she seems to be recovering. Apparently, he feared that she might not survive, for on 19 March, when he at last hears from her, he writes, ‘The momentary anxiety of a world without Emily in it was not pleasant.’ Eliot’s anxiety of infl uence extended beyond his relationship with Emily Hale. His lett ers suggest that it was associated with his Christian vocation, that for him, it was a point of intersection between ethics and theology. As Jesus reminded his disciples, anyone who causes the weak or the young to stumble will be judged harshly. ‘It were bett er for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should off end one of these litt le ones (Luke 17:1-2).11 Eliot makes the connection between evil infl uence and judgement in a lett er writt en after confession on Holy Saturday 1933. His specifi c concern circles around an awareness of two issues – fi rst, the weight of infl uence, and second, Hale’s suggestion that he should divorce Vivienne. He claims that one of the reasons he cannot divorce is that he has become, for persons he does not even know, ‘a kind of symbol’. Complete strangers send lett ers expressing admiration and gratitude. They have litt le knowledge of the person they have embraced as a symbol and, given the fact that many are admirers of The Waste Land or The Hollow Men, he wonders about the eff ect he has had on them. Some are receptive to his infl uence because of his prestige as a public intellectual and, after his conversion, as a well-known lay person in the Anglican Communion. In the context of Hale’s repeated suggestion that he should divorce Vivienne, he explains that consciousness of the moral liability of infl uence makes it necessary for him to restrict his behaviour. And then, he indulges in obvious hyperbole, suggesting that if he were to divorce, it would be ‘the greatest misfortune to the Anglican Church since Newman went over to Rome.’ Eliot is also concerned about his infl uence over younger friends, including John Hayward and Stephen Spender. He feels a special burden in regard to Spender, for whom he feels a curious att raction. One facet of unintended infl uence, Eliot fears, is that it takes on a life of its own, and one cost of the awareness of moral liability is a peculiar loneliness. Two years later, on 5 July 1935, he uses his consciousness of the perilous nature of infl uence as a reason for wearing a mask, for keeping space between ‘what I stand for’ and ‘what I am’. Eliot’s year in America, as I argued in Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination, was one of several turning points in his life and art. The most consequential months were those immediately following his Christmas reunion with Hale in California. This week of 11 King James (Authorised) Version. 24 THE GLASS

Platonic intimacy casts a bright light on insurmountable diff erences between the idea and the reality, the greatest of which was intellectual and spiritual incompatibility. On 16 May, he told Hale that he had worried a great deal since Christmas that she considered the Church to be ‘monstrously bigoted’. To her suggestion that the church was to blame for his infl exibility on divorce, he responded that the church’s position on marriage is integral to the distinction between man and beast. As he said in his lectures in Virginia, ‘The perception of Good and Evil – whatever choice we make – is the fi rst requisite of spiritual life’ (Prose 5.39). The experience in California, followed immediately by his visit with family in St. Louis, led him to conclude that Unitarians, including Emily Hale and his parents, believed in good and bad, but not in Good and Evil. The overlap between the lett ers to Emily Hale and Eliot’s contemporaneous lectures on the moral imagination reveals that his year in America did not end either his moral ambivalence or her self-destructive acquiescence. Given the incongruity of their understanding of the spiritual life, the slow demise of their romance seems to have been inevitable.

25 Notes on Contributors

Dr Richard Briggs has taught the Old Testament in Durham for over 15 years at Cranmer Hall in St John’s College. He is also an Anglican minister in a small parish just outside Durham city. His recent publications have included Theological Hermeneutics and the Book of Numbers as Christian Scripture (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018) and Jesus for Life: Spiritual Readings in John’s Gospel (Cascade Books, 2019). He is presently writing a theology of the book of Psalms for Cambridge University Press.

Jewel Spears Brooker, Professor Emerita at Eckerd College in Florida, has recently held visiting appointments at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Oxford (Merton College). She has writt en or edited ten books, the latest of which is T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination (2018) and is the co-editor of volumes I and VIII of Eliot’s Complete Prose (2014, 2019). Professor Brooker has served as president of South Atlantic Modern Language Association and the T. S. Eliot Society in the USA and served for six years on the National Humanities Council.

Samuel Cardwell is a PhD student in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He is currently working on a dissertation on the history of the idea of evangelisation in early medieval Europe. He has previously published in journals including The Journal of Medieval History and Early Middle English.

Awarded the OBE 2017 for services to scholarship and the understanding of the humanities, Valentine Cunningham is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature and Emeritus Fellow and Lecturer in English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He works widely across literary, historical, and cultural periods and genres, in addition to his studies in literary theory his books cover such diverse topics as Victorian poetry, the Spanish Civil War, and King Lear.

Marie K. Daouda is a Doctor of French and Comparative Literature and a Stipendiary Lecturer in French at Oriel College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the reception of Antiquity in modern times, on the artistic representations of good and evil, and on 19th-20th century religious and political crises in France and in the United Kingdom.

David Jasper is Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow where he was Professor of Literature and Theology. He was also Changjiang Chair Professor at Renmin University of China, Beijing. He is Canon Theologian of St. Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow. His most recent book is Heaven in Ordinary: Poetry and Religion in a Secular Age (2018).

Joseph Kuhn is Associate Professor of American Literature at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. His research interests are mainly in twentieth-century American southern literature and he has published in journals such as the Journal of American Studies.

74 THE GLASS

Irene Montori recently completed her doctoral studies at Sapienza, University of Rome. Her research unites the twin discourses of aesthetic and ethical value in the seventeenth century formation of the literary sublime, with particular emphasis on Milton’s dramatic works.

Dr Roger Pooley was one of the fi rst members of the CLSG. He retired from his teaching post at Keele University but remains an honorary Research Fellow there.

Alicia Smith is working towards a DPhil at the Queen’s College, Oxford, focusing on the prayer practices of anchorites and how they refl ect on historiographical praxis and time.

Yuxiao Su is Professor of English Literature at the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University, China, where she is Executive Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Transcultural Studies. She has published a monograph and several articles (Chinese and English) on C.S. Lewis’s literary criticism and medieval studies. She has been a contributor to English Language journals such as The Journal of Inklings Studies, Bunyan Studies and Religions.

Dr Andrew Tate is Reader in Literature, Religion and Aesthetics in the Department of English & Creative Writing at Lancaster University. His books include Contemporary Fiction and Christianity (2008), The New Atheist Novel (co-authored with Arthur Bradley) (2010) and Apocalyptic Fiction (2017). He is also the co-editor, with Jo Carruthers and Mark Knight, of Literature and the Bible: a Reader (2013) and, with Roger Kojecký, Visions and Revisions: The Word and the Text (2013).

Margaret Wiedemann Hunt taught in schools and adult education and has a PhD on the religious plays of Dorothy L. Sayers. She is the honorary archivist of Radius, formerly The Religious Drama Society, and is working on a history of the Society.

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