Abstract
This essay surveys the treatment of Satan in three significant though largely neglected novels of the 1930s, Klaus Mann’s Mephisto (1936), Howell Davies’ Congratulate the Devil (1939), and Anton Tamsaare’s The Misadventures of the New Satan (1939). Despite the marginalization of discourse about Satan in European Christianity of the period, each of these novels adopts its own idiosyncratic stance towards the realistic representation of a diabolical entity, drawing on a combination of biblical and folkloric models. Whilst Mann’s novel reiterates and extends the Faustian tradition of the individual succumbing to damnation, the other two novels inventively uphold the folkloric reception of the biblical Satan as a social force.
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©2014 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- “Gar nicht biblisch!” [Not biblical at all!]: Ephesians, Marriage, and Radical Pietism in Eighteenth-Century Germany
- Facilitating Speech and Discourse: Biblical Interpretation and the Emergence of a Concept of Gender Equality
- Three 1930s Novels about Satan
- Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner”1: Revisiting the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32)
- Yes We Can (Hyperbolize)! Ideals, Rhetoric, and Tradition Transmission
- Dispatches from EBR: A Report on Volumes 1–10 (of 30), with Special Focus on Reception-related Matters
- Book Review
- Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical Reception History
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- “Gar nicht biblisch!” [Not biblical at all!]: Ephesians, Marriage, and Radical Pietism in Eighteenth-Century Germany
- Facilitating Speech and Discourse: Biblical Interpretation and the Emergence of a Concept of Gender Equality
- Three 1930s Novels about Satan
- Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner”1: Revisiting the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11–32)
- Yes We Can (Hyperbolize)! Ideals, Rhetoric, and Tradition Transmission
- Dispatches from EBR: A Report on Volumes 1–10 (of 30), with Special Focus on Reception-related Matters
- Book Review
- Nomadic Text: A Theory of Biblical Reception History