Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron

by Peter A. Schock

Criticism has largely emphasized the private meaning of "Romantic Satanism", treating it as the celebration of subjectivity through allusions to Paradise Lost that voice Satan's solitary defiance. The first full-length treatment of its subject, Romantic Satanism explores this literary phenomenon as a socially produced myth exhibiting the response of writers to their milieu. Through contextualized readings of the major works of Blake, Shelley, and Byron, this book demonstrates that Satanism enabled Romantic writers to interpret their tempestuous age: it provided them a mythic medium for articulating the hopes and fears their age aroused, for prophesying and inducing change.

Genres: Satanism, Religion, History, Nonfiction, Poetry, Literature, Gothic

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Jack Skelley]

Demonic writers/artists seize the sublimity of Satan, perverted (in ‘Paradise Lost’) into heroic protagonist: “An apotheosis [i.e. deification] of human will and consciousness fuses mythic identity” into political revolution and sexual anarchy, and “identifies hell not only with the body but with an inner world of spiritual energy.”