Sara lidman's secular reading of original sin

Abstract

This paper takes a plunge into the novelistic universe of Swedish writer Sara Lidman's epic of modernity in the novel suite The Railway, focusing on her secular reinterpretation of original sin and the fall, and her rendering of the fundamental agonism of human existence, set in a frame of social change, liberal hope, and voracious capitalism. It considers Lidman's thinking as a suggestion for the kind of new conception of original sin that Iris Murdoch called for.