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Three 1930s Novels about Satan

  • Anthony Swindell EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: October 16, 2014
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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.


Corresponding author: Anthony Swindell, King’s College, University of London, UK, e-mail:

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Published Online: 2014-10-16
Published in Print: 2014-10-1

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