Mythic Time and Fragmented Memory: Rewriting Paradise in Contemporary English Literature

Abstract

This paper investigates how literary objects acquire narrative autonomy and symbolic authority across four major English literary works: The Dream of the Rood, The Rape of Lucrece, The Woodlanders, and His Dark Materials. Drawing upon object-oriented criticism and theories of material agency, the paper argues that literary objects transcend their conventional symbolic function to become dynamic nonhuman characters capable of influencing action, generating meaning, and reshaping human consciousness. The analysis explores how objects participate in the construction of mythic memory and cultural identity. In The Dream of the Rood, the speaking tree-cross embodies both martyrdom and kingship, creating a theological vision rooted in Anglo-Saxon heroic culture. Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece presents domestic and natural objects as silent witnesses and protectors that attempt to intervene against sexual violence, thereby exposing tensions between gendered silence and ethical agency. In Hardy’s The Woodlanders, material fragments such as hair become repositories of industrial anxiety and failed human desire, symbolizing the fragmentation of organic communal life in the modern age. In Pullman’s His Dark Materials, magical instruments resist human mastery and ultimately articulate an alternative postreligious Eden founded upon consciousness, sensuality, and coexistence. The paper contends that these objects embody humanity’s recurring desire to recover a prelapsarian unity between the human and nonhuman worlds. However, each text simultaneously acknowledges the impossibility of fully restoring that harmony. Through this tension between longing and loss, literary objects become crucial mediators of myth, memory, and historical change. Ultimately, the study demonstrates that nonhuman agency in literature reflects not only changing conceptions of materiality but also evolving understandings of what it means to be human in a world increasingly shaped by the presence and power of things.