Faust

Professor Durrani's study is the first volume in a new series devoted to the key figures of modern culture. Few of these have remained as influential as Faust. From the sixteenth century, when he was reviled as a necromancer, to the eighteenth, when he was re-invented as a progressive free-thinker, and to the turn of the twenty-first century, when he tends to be cast as a warning to reckless scientists and unscrupulous politicians, Faust has come to symbolise the extremes of brilliance and villainy of which the misguided genius is capable. Countless authorities have attributed the loftiest aspirations and the foulest crimes to him. He has become an emblem of modern man, restlessly inquisitive and obsessed with information-gathering, exotic travel, and serial philandering, all of which fail to satisfy his spiritual needs. Was he a pathetic charlatan or a trail-blazing philosopher? Why did the erstwhile transgressor come to attract widespread sympathy during the Age of Reason? What was the effect of his story on the Romantic poets, composers, and painters? What made both National Socialists and Communists claim him as their own in the propaganda battles of the twentieth century? How is he viewed in Ireland, America, Russia and Japan? These and other issues are thoroughly examined in this investigation of the unstable image of a uniquely representative individual whose influence on prose and verse, on visual art, music, film, and popular culture is second to none.