The Demonic: Literature and Experience

ISBN-13: 9780415690256 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 336 str.

Ewan Fernie

Opis

Are we either good or bad, and do we really know the difference? Why do we want what we cannot have, and even to be what we're not? Can we desire others without wanting to possess them? Can we open to others and not risk possession ourselves? And where, in these cases, do we draw the line? Ewan Fernie argues that the demonic tradition in literature offers a key to our most agonised and intimate experiences. The Demonic ranges across the breadth of Western culture, engaging with writers as central and various as Luther, Shakespeare, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Melville and Mann. A powerful foreword by Jonathan Dollimore brings out its implications as an intellectual and stylistic breakthrough into new ways of writing criticism. Fernie unfolds an intense and personal vision, not just of Western modernity, but of identity, morality and sex. As much as it's concerned with the great works, this is a book about life.

Spis treści

Part One: Demonic Negativity  1. Dark Night of the Soul  2. Luther: Man between God and the Devil  3. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus  4. Demonic Macbeth  5. Satan (and Demonic Sex)  6. A Justified Sinner  7. Dostoevsky’s Demons  8. Thomas Mann as Dr Faustus (via Love’s Labour’s Lost)  9. She Devil  10. Loving the Alien  Part Two:  Turnabout and Dialectic  11. Kierkegaard Trembling  12. Nietzsche: A Demon that Laughs  13. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell  14. Demonic Dialectic: Boehme, Schelling, Hegel  Part Three: Possession  15. Introduction A. The Agony in Possessing  16. Angelo  17. Claggart  18. Possessing a Child  19. Possessive God  20. Christ the Possessor  B. The Possessed  21. Introduction 22. Donne  23. Poor Tom  24. A Freudian Interruption  25. The Devils of Loudon  26. Jane Lead  27. The Master of Petersburg  28. Schreber

O autorze

Ewan Fernie is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, author of Shame in Shakespeare, and joint General Editor of the Shakespeare Now! series. Redcrosse, his latest, collaborative project, is a new poetic liturgy for St George's Day, which has been performed in major cathedrals and by the RSC, and a book published in 2012.