TABLE OF CONTENTS: List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
PRELUDE: The Timeless Topicality of Myth 3
PART ONE: ANCIENT THEMES 7
CHAPTER ONE: Adam: The Genesis of Consciousness 9
The Biblical Fall 9
Near Eastern Sources 13
The Paradox of Knowledge in Solomon's Jerusalem 17
CHAPTER TWO: Prometheus: The Birth of Civilization 25
Hesiod's Trickster 25
Aeschylus's Culture-Hero 32
From Boeotia to Athens 39
CHAPTER THREE: Faust: The Ambivalence of Knowledge 43
The Historical Faust 43
The Growth of the Legend 49
The Chapbook Speculator 52
Marlowe's Power Seeker 60
INTERLUDE: From Myth to Modernity 69
PART TWO: MODERN VARIATIONS 73
CHAPTER FOUR: The Secularization of Adam Candide's Fall 75
The Typological Impulse 77
Romantic Tragicomic Falls 82
American Ambiguities 92
Modern Ironies 100
CHAPTER FIVE: The Proletarianization of Prometheus 111
From Myth to Marx 111
Modern Metaphors 115
Marxist Myths 121
GDR Ambiguities 127
Three Major Re-Visions 132
The Enemy of the People 141
CHAPTER SIX: The Americanization of Faust 149
Modernizations of the Myth 149
Faust and the Bomb 153
Playful Fausts of the Fifties 156
A Blue-Collar Faust 161
Professorial Faults 164
Faults of Politics and Poetry 174
Fausts for the Nineties 177
POSTLUDE: On the Uses and Abuses of Myth 183
Notes 193
Bibliography 205
Index 217
Return to Book Description File created: 4/25/2013 | 
