Desire and the Devil: Demonic Contracts in French and European Literature

Exploring the vast terrain covered in Continental European literature after the demise of -orthodox- pacts, "Desire and the Devil" highlights the conceptual dialectic of evil and its discontents, and cohesively traces a number of fundamental modern "poetics of unorthodoxy" (Goethe, Balzac, Flaubert, Bulgakov, Nerval). The book asks - and answers - the ultimate question as to -what it means to give oneself over to Satan- (Baudelaire) in today's "post-systematic world." It also reveals the second-level epistemological shifts behind the entangled thematic peripeties of the pact with the devil since the Sturm-und-Drang's renewed interest in -evil-."