ABSTRACT
The first National Conference on Literature and Religion was held in the University of Durham on 23-25 September, 1982. The Durham conference was only what Dillistone called 'a welcome and promising beginning' and a 'withdrawing of blinds', yet from the start, in England, there were two differences from the Chicago programme. First, it was more precisely theological, indeed, liturgical in its nature, drawing on its nineteenth century Tractarian roots. Second, it was, in some respects, more strictly philosophical. Walker's lecture refers in passing to a wide range of literature and reading, including George Steiner's 'brilliant recent exposition of Heidegger on the Fall'. Aids to Reflection also permeated at a deep unconscious level the spirit and thought of the Durham conference of 1982. The two subsequent conferences in 1984 and 1986 continued to focus upon the nineteenth century and Romanticism, its critical languages and its sense of religious withdrawal.
