The Hermeneutics of Hell

Visions and Representations of the Devil in World Literature

Gregor Thuswaldner, Daniel Russ, Gregor Thuswaldner, Daniel Russ

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319521978
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319521985
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Literature

This collection of essays analyzes global depictions of the devil from theological, Biblical, and literary perspectives, spanning the late Middle Ages to the 21st century. The chapters explore demonic representations in the literary works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Dante Alighieri, Charles Baudelaire, John Milton, H.P. Lovecraft, and Cormac McCarthy, among others. The text examines other media such as the operas Orfeo and Erminia sul Giordano and the television shows Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and Mad Men. 
The Hermeneutics of Hell, featuring an international set of established and up-and-coming authors, masterfully examines the evolution of the devil from the Biblical accounts of the Middle Ages to the individualized presence of the modern world. 

Table of contents

• Contents
• Contributors
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1 Introduction: The Devil We Know and the Devils We Don’t Know
• Chapter 2 “Two Brass Mites of the Widow”: Saint Bridget of Sweden and the Terrors of Hell
• Chapter 3 The Uses of Tentatio: Satan, Luther, and Theological Maturation
• Chapter 4 As an Angel of Light: Satanic Rhetoric in Early Modern Literature and Theology
• Chapter 5 Astrophal Redivivus: The Coinage of the Discourse on the Devil in the Early Modern Age in Georg Bernardt S.J.’s Tundalus Redivivus (1622)
• Chapter 6 The Drama of Hell: Sources and Interpretation in Seventeenth-Century Operatic Infernal Scenes
• Chapter 7 The Diabolic Logic of : Towards a Hermeneutics of Hell in Goethe’s Faust
• Chapter 8 Literature, Theology, Survival
• Chapter 9 Dostoevsky’s Demons
• Chapter 10 Money as the Devil in B. Traven’s “Assembly Line,” and Its Sources in Scripture, the Faust Legend, and New England Puritanism
• Chapter 11 “la manière de Milton”: Baudelaire Reads Milton’s Satan
• Chapter 12 Visions of Hell in Flannery O’Connor
• Chapter 13 “He Haunts One for Hours Afterwards”: Demonic Dissonance in Milton’s Satan and Lovecraft’s Nyarlathotep
• Chapter 14 “The One Who Knocks”: Milton’s Lucifer and the American Tragic Character
• Chapter 15 Reading the Devil in the Landscape
• Chapter 16 A Landscape of the Damned: Evil and Nothingness in Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark
• Index