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The Cambridge Quarterly 2006 35(1):1-29; doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfj001
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© The Author, 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Cambridge Quarterly. All rights reserved. For permissions please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Between Satan and Mephistopheles: Byron and the Devil

Fred Parker

Fred Parker is a Senior Lecturer in English at Cambridge. His most recent book is Scepticism and Literature; he is now working on a study of the Devil’s alleged influence on literature from Milton to Thomas Mann.

This article discusses Byron’s knowledge of Goethe’s Faust and its influence on Manfred, Cain, Don Juan, and The Vision of Judgment. Byron’s appreciation of Goethe’s fundamentally ambivalent Mephistopheles transforms the ‘Satanism’ that his earlier writings derive from Paradise Lost. Mephisto’s bathetic realism softens the absolute opposition between the alienated self and the otherness of things into a more functional, open, dialogic liaison. This has analogues in the history of the representation of the Devil, notably in Job. The argument both develops and modifies positions on Byron advanced by McGann.


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