Faustus and the Promises of the New Science, c. 1580-1730
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A01=Christa King
Author_Christa King
Bad Angel
bernard
Biographisch Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon
book
Book III
bovier
Category=DSB
Copernican Theory
cosmic imagination
damnable
doctor
Doctor Faustus
Doctor John Faustus
early
early modern literature
early modern science and belief systems
english
English Faust Book
Enlightenment thought
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Eve's Dream
Eve’s Dream
Faust Books
Faust Tradition
Faustus Legend
Faustus Stories
Faustus Theme
fontenelle
Harlequin Doctor Faustus
Harlequin Faustus
Ho Ho
intellectual history
legend
Markku Peltonen
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus
Marlowe's Faustus
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
Marlowe’s Faustus
Mock Heroic Mode
modern
morality and science
Novum Organum
Paradise Lost
Pay For Performances
religious scepticism
Sachiko Kusukawa
Young Men
Product details
- ISBN 9780754661337
- Weight: 521g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Nov 2008
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Having identified the literary origins of the Faustus legend in the German Faust Book (1587) and its English translation (1592), this book argues that these works transformed a simple rogue's tale into an incisive study of morality and beliefs. The chapbooks' contrastive portrayal of an imaginary experience of hell and a pseudo-scientific journey through the cosmos is interpreted as an unconventional approach to the questions of an inquiring mind. This study offers the first analysis of the chapbooks as literary works in their own right, as opposed to simply being sources for Christopher Marlowe's play. It is also the first study to describe the Faustus typology as a vehicle by which uncompromising thinkers of early modernity and the Enlightenment questioned contemporary views about religion, morality and the possibility of experiencing transcendence. While arguing that Marlowe's Doctor Faustus primarily examines the imaginary foundations of religious rules and standards, the author suggests that the 1616 version of the play revived the chapbooks' accounts of spiritual ravishment and intellectual ecstasy. Imaginary explorations of cosmic space became popular in the seventeenth century and gave rise to strongly diverging works of literature, embracing the arcane spirituality of Milton's Paradise Lost as well as Fontenelle's sociable but essentially secular fantasy of cosmic travel. This book shows that contemporary responses to early modern science also tended to address the most urgent concerns of the Faustus legend, explaining the re-emergence of the typology in Mountfort's late seventeenth-century farcical Faustus play and early eighteenth-century harlequinades about Doctor Faustus
Christa Knellwolf King is a Visiting Professor of English and Cultural History at the University of Konstanz while retaining an adjunct position at the Australian National University.
