Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-hfldf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-01T11:29:49.499Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 3 - The Biblical Fall

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2019

David Troupes
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Get access

Summary

This chapter turns to the many poems in which Hughes plays with the characters of Adam, Eve and the Serpent, including an attempt to tease out Hughes’s sense of human moral accountability. We tour some of the most raucous of Hughes’s Edenic rewrites, including “Theology” and “A Horrible Religious Error,” demonstrating how Hughes continues to pursue an essentially religious agenda in the teeth of his gleeful anti-ecclesiasticism. The chapter turns then to morality, addressing a central paradox of Hughes’s work: he seems on the one hand to embrace Nietzsche’s anti-Christian moral nihilism, but on the other hand he argues passionately on behalf of our moral obligations toward nature. The problematic biblical term “dominion” is discussed. Many of the moral inconsistencies presented in this chapter are seen to smooth out in Hughes’s farming poems, in which Mosaic moral duty and ecological responsibility unite within a lapsarian view of human existence.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • The Biblical Fall
  • David Troupes, University of Sheffield
  • Book: Ted Hughes and Christianity
  • Online publication: 17 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108594363.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • The Biblical Fall
  • David Troupes, University of Sheffield
  • Book: Ted Hughes and Christianity
  • Online publication: 17 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108594363.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The Biblical Fall
  • David Troupes, University of Sheffield
  • Book: Ted Hughes and Christianity
  • Online publication: 17 June 2019
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108594363.003
Available formats
×