ABSTRACT
To this point we have taken a broadly historical journey through demonic literature, from Luther to Fay Weldon, locating the theme in the heart of the English canon, in Marlowe and Milton, and in Shakespeare. We have seen how the demonic flourishes and flames again in masterpieces from other European traditions: in Hogg’s Calvinist Confessions, in Dostoevsky, and in Mann’s great and dreadful demonic summa, Doctor Faustus. All these works have engaged with demonic negativity not as some scholastic quibble but as a great snare within – if not an intrinsic structure of – human spirituality and experience. All of them, too, have been disturbed by glimmerings of the precious and the positive in demonic negativity, which bears out Shakespeare’s dictum in Henry V : ‘There is some soul of goodness in things evil, / Would men observingly distil it out’ (4.1.4–5). 1
