Research Scholars and Rebel Angels: Faustian Drama and the Modern University in Novels by C.S. Lewis, Simon Raven and Robertson Davies
Research Scholars and Rebel Angels: Faustian Drama and the Modern University in Novels by C.S. Lewis, Simon Raven and Robertson Davies

Summary/Abstract: In novels by C.S. Lewis, Simon Raven and Robertson Davies, universities are depicted as plausible, and theologically over-determined, settings for battles between cosmic forces, good and evil – battles foreshadowed in earlier “Faustian” dramas and involving “middle spirits”, ambiguously poised between gods and devils, as they relate to humans. Human desires for knowledge, creativity and personal freedom, arguably the consequences of a theologically definable (and perhaps fortunate) “Fall”, are shown to be institutionally entrenched in (Anglophone) universities and caught up in socially recognisable and “modern” contradictions. They are seen also, and to that extent plausibly, as offering opportunities for diabolic agencies whose effects take shape, within the outworkings of apparently human projects, as a set of systematically unintended, and tendentially disastrous, consequences. Representations of such conflicts, and of their violent consequences, vary, between the three novelists under discussion, in terms not only of the writers’ personal creeds and convictions, but also of social plausibility and diverse modes of narration and emplotment.

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