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19 books match the query 'Devil'

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Bringing the Devil to His Knees

The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life

Charles Baxter and Peter Turchi, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2001

In Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, seventeen award-winning writers--all expert teachers--share the secrets of creating compelling, imaginative stories and novels. A combination handbook, writer's companion, and collection of spirited personal essays, the book is filled with specific examples, hard-won wisdom, and compassionate guidance for the developing or experienced fiction writer.
Each of the contributors is a current or former lecturer at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, one of the most highly respected writing programs in the country. Included are essays by Charles Baxter, Robert Boswell, Karen Brennan, Judith Grossman, Ehud Havazelet, C. J. Hribal, Margot Livesey, Michael Martone, Kevin McIlvoy, Pablo Medina, Antonya Nelson, Susan Neville, Richard Russo, Steven Schwartz, Jim Shepard, Joan Silber, Debra Spark, Peter Turchi, and Chuck Wachtel.
Rich with masterful examples and personal anecdotes, these imaginative essays provide hard-earned insight into a writer's work. The book will interest not only those seeking inspiration and guidance to become stronger writers, but also readers of contemporary literary fiction, who will find a number of surprising and original approaches to the writer's work by award-winning practitioners adept at teaching others what they know.
Charles Baxter is author of several novels, including The Feast of Love, Shadow Play, and First Light. and collections of stories including Believers and A Relative Stranger. He teaches writing at the University of Michigan. Peter Turchi is author of the novel The Girls Next Door, a collection of stories, Magician, and a book of non-fiction, The Pirate Prince. He is Director of the MFA Program for Writers, Warren Wilson College.

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Christian Origins and the Language of the Kingdom of God

Michael L. Humphries. Foreword by Burton L. Mack

Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Traditionally, scholars have traced the origin of Christianity to a single source—the kingdom of God as represented in the message of the historical Jesus. Through a rhetorical critical analysis of one of the most important texts in early Christian literature (the Beelzebul controversy), Michael L. Humphries addresses the issue of Christian origins, demonstrating how the language of the kingdom of God is best understood according to its locative or taxonomic effect where the demarcation of social and cultural boundaries contributes to the emergence of this new social foundation.

The Beelzebul controversy exists in two versions— Q and Mark—and thereby allows the study to engage the import of the kingdom language at the point of juxtaposition between two distinct textual representations. This makes it possible to deal directly with the issue of the disparity of texts in the synoptic tradition. Humphries suggests that these two versions of the same controversy indicate two distinct social trajectories wherein the kingdom of God comes to mean something quite different in each case but that nevertheless they demonstrate a similarity in theoretical effect where the language contributes to the emergence of relatively distinct social formations.

Humphries establishes the Q and Markan versions of the Beelzebul controversy as relatively sophisticated compositions that are formally identified as elaborate chreiai (a literary form used in the teaching of rhetoric at the secondary and post-secondary level of GrecoRoman education) and that offer an excellent example of the rhetorical manipulation of language in the development of social and cultural identity.

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Dancing with the Devil

Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas

Jose Limon

University of Wisconsin Press, 1994

Combining shrewd applications of current cultural theory with compelling autobiography and elegant prose, José E. Limón works at the intersection of anthropology, folklore, popular culture, history, and literary criticism. A native of South Texas, he renders a historical and ethnographic account of its rich Mexican-American folk culture. This folk culture, he shows—whether expressed through male joking rituals, ballroom polka dances, folk healing, or eating and drinking traditions—metaphorically dances with the devil, both resisting and accommodating the dominant culture of Texas.
Critiquing the work of his precursors— John Gregory Bourke, J. Frank Dobie, Jovita Gonzalez, and Americo Paredes—Limón deftly demonstrates that their accounts of Mexican-Americans in South Texas contain race, class, and gender contradictions, revealed most clearly in their accounts of the folkloric figure of the devil. Limón's own field-based ethnography follows, and again the devil appears as a recurrent motif, signaling the ideological contradictions of folk practices in a South Texas on the verge of postmodernity.

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Devil in Deerskins

My Life with Grey Owl

University of Manitoba Press, 2014

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Fetch the Devil

The Sierra Diablo Murders and Nazi Espionage in America

Clint Richmond

University Press of New England, 2014

In 1938, Hazel Frome, the wife of a powerful executive at Atlas Powder Company, a San Francisco explosives manufacturer, set out on a cross-country motor trip with her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Nancy. When their car broke down in El Paso, Texas, they made the most of being stranded by staying at a posh hotel and crossing the border to Juarez for shopping, dining, and drinking. A week later, their near-nude bodies were found in the Chihuahuan Desert. Though they had been seen on occasion with two mystery men, there were no clues as to why they had apparently been abducted, tortured for days, and shot execution style. El Paso sheriff Chris Fox, a lawman right out of central casting, engaged in a turf war with the Texas Rangers and local officials that hampered the investigation. But the victims’ detours had placed them in the path of a Nazi spy ring operating from the West Coast to Latin America through a deep-cover portal at El Paso. The sleeper cell was run by spymasters at the German consulate in San Francisco. In 1938, only the inner circle of the Roosevelt White House and a few FBI agents were aware of the extent to which German agents had infiltrated American industry. Fetch the Devil is the first narrative account of this still officially unsolved case. Based on long forgotten archives and recently declassified FBI files, Richmond paints a convincing portrait of a sheriff’s dogged investigation into a baffling murder, the international spy ring that orchestrated it, and America on the brink of another world war.

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Hunt the Devil

A Demonology of US War Culture

Robert L. Ivie and Oscar Giner

University of Alabama Press, 2015

Hunt the Devil is a timely and illuminating exploration of demonic imagery in US war culture. In it, authors Robert L. Ivie and Oscar Giner examine the origins of the Devil figure in the national psyche and review numerous examples from US history of the demonization of America’s perceived opponents. Their analysis demonstrates that American military deployments are often part of a cycle of mythical projection wherein the Devil repeatedly appears anew and must be exorcised through redemptive acts of war, even at the cost of curtailing democratic values.

Meticulously researched, documented, and argued, Hunt the Devil opens with contemporary images of the US’s global war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11. In five chapters devoted to the demonization of evildoers, witches, Indians, dictators, and Reds by American writers, in presidential rhetoric, and in popular culture, Ivie and Giner show how the use of demonization in the war on terror is only the most recent manifestation of a process that has recurred throughout American history.

In a sixth chapter, the authors introduce the archetype of the Trickster. Though not opposed to the Devil per se, the Trickster’s democratic impulses have often provided a corrective antidote to the corrosive and distorting effects of demonization. Invoking the framework of Carl Jung’s shadow aspect, Hunt the Devil offers the Trickster as a figure who can break the cycle of demonization and war.

The role of the mythic Devil in the American psyche has profound implications, not just for American diplomacy and the use of American arms in the world, but for the possibility of domestic peace within an increasingly diverse society. Hunt the Devil provides much of interest to readers and scholars in the fields of war, rhetorical studies, American Studies, US political culture, Jungian psychology, and mythography.

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In the Company of Demons

Unnatural Beings, Love, and Identity in the Italian Renaissance

Armando Maggi

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Who are the familiar spirits of classical culture and what is their relationship to Christian demons? In its interpretation of Latin and Greek culture, Christianity contends that Satan is behind all classical deities, semi-gods, and spiritual creatures, including the gods of the household, the lares and penates.But with In the Company of Demons, the world’s leading demonologist Armando Maggi argues that the great thinkers of the Italian Renaissance had a more nuanced and perhaps less sinister interpretation of these creatures or spiritual bodies.

Maggi leads us straight to the heart of what Italian Renaissance culture thought familiar spirits were. Through close readings of Giovan Francesco Pico della Mirandola, Strozzi Cigogna, Pompeo della Barba, Ludovico Sinistrari, and others, we find that these spirits or demons speak through their sudden and striking appearances—their very bodies seen as metaphors to be interpreted. The form of the body, Maggi explains, relies on the spirits’ knowledge of their human interlocutors’ pasts. But their core trait is compassion, and sometimes their odd, eerie arrivals are seen as harbingers or warnings to protect us. It comes as no surprise then that when spiritual beings distort the natural world to communicate, it is vital that we begin to listen.

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Laughing at the Devil

Seeing the World with Julian of Norwich

Amy Laura Hall

Duke University Press, 2018

Laughing at the Devil is an invitation to see the world with a medieval visionary now known as Julian of Norwich, believed to be the first woman to have written a book in English. (We do not know her given name, because she became known by the name of a church that became her home.) Julian “saw our Lord scorn [the Devil's] wickedness” and noted that “he wants us to do the same.” In this impassioned, analytic, and irreverent book, Amy Laura Hall emphasizes Julian's call to scorn the Devil. Julian of Norwich envisioned courage during a time of fear. Laughing at the Devil describes how a courageous woman transformed a setting of dread into hope, solidarity, and resistance.

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Satan the Heretic

The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West

Alain Boureau

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Before the end of the thirteenth century, theologians had little interest in demons, but with Thomas Aquinas and his formidable “Treatise on Evil” in 1272, everything changed. In Satan the Heretic, Alain Boureau trains his skeptical eye not on Satan or Satanism, but on the birth of demonology and the sudden belief in the power of demons who inhabited Satan’s Court, setting out to understand not why people believed in demons, but why theologians—especially Pope John XXII—became so interested in the subject.

Depicting this new demonology, Satan the Heretic considers the period between the mid-thirteenth and mid-fourteenth centuries when demons, in the eyes of Church authorities, suddenly burst forth, more real and more terrifying than ever before in the history of Christianity. Boureau argues that the rise in this obsession with demons occurs at the crossroads of the rise of sovereignties and of the individual, a rise that, tellingly, also coincides with the emergence of the modern legal system in the European West.

Teeming with original insights and lively anecdotes, Satan the Heretic is a significant contribution to the history of Christian demonology from one of the most original minds in the field of medieval studies today.

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Say No to the Devil

The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis

Ian Zack

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Who was the greatest of all American guitarists? You probably didn’t name Gary Davis, but many of his musical contemporaries considered him without peer. Bob Dylan called Davis “one of the wizards of modern music.” Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead—who took lessons with Davis—claimed his musical ability “transcended any common notion of a bluesman.” And the folklorist Alan Lomax called him “one of the really great geniuses of American instrumental music.” But you won’t find Davis alongside blues legends Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Despite almost universal renown among his contemporaries, Davis lives today not so much in his own work but through covers of his songs by Dylan, Jackson Browne, and many others, as well as in the untold number of students whose lives he influenced.

The first biography of Davis, Say No to the Devil restores “the Rev’s” remarkable story. Drawing on extensive research and interviews with many of Davis’s former students, Ian Zack takes readers through Davis’s difficult beginning as the blind son of sharecroppers in the Jim Crow South to his decision to become an ordained Baptist minister and his move to New York in the early 1940s, where he scraped out a living singing and preaching on street corners and in storefront churches in Harlem. There, he gained entry into a circle of musicians that included, among many others, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, and Dave Van Ronk. But in spite of his tremendous musical achievements, Davis never gained broad recognition from an American public that wasn’t sure what to make of his trademark blend of gospel, ragtime, street preaching, and the blues. His personal life was also fraught, troubled by struggles with alcohol, women, and deteriorating health.

Zack chronicles this remarkable figure in American music, helping us to understand how he taught and influenced a generation of musicians.

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The Devil and the Dolce Vita

Catholic Attempts to Save Italy's Soul, 1948-1974

Roy Domenico

Catholic University of America Press, 2021

Italy’s economic expansion after World War Two triggered significant social and cultural change. Secularization accompanied this development and triggered alarm bells across the nation’s immense Catholic community. The Devil and the Dolce Vita is the story of that community – the church of Popes Pius XII, John XXIII and Paul VI, the lay Catholic Action association, and the Christian Democratic Party – and their efforts in a series of culture wars to preserve a traditional way of life and to engage and tame the challenges of a rapidly modernizing society. Roy Domenico begins this study during the heady days of the April 1948 Christian Democratic electoral triumph and ends when pro-divorce forces dealt the Catholics a defeat in the referendum of May 1974 where their hopes crashed and probably ended. Between those two dates Catholics engaged secularists in a number of battles – many over film and television censorship, encountering such figures as Roberto Rossellini, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. The Venice Film Festival became a locus in the fight as did places like Pozzonovo, near Padua, where the Catholics directed their energies against a Communist youth organization; and Prato in Tuscany where the bishop led a fight to preserve church weddings. Concern with proper decorum led to more skirmishes on beaches and at resorts over modest attire and beauty pageants. By the 1960s and 1970s other issues, such as feminism, a new frankness about sexual relations, and the youth rebellion emerged to contribute to a perfect storm that led to the divorce referendum and widespread despair in the Catholic camp.

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The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross

Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil

By Laura de Mello e Souza

University of Texas Press, 2004

Originally published in Brazil as O Diabo e a Terra de Santa Cruz, this translation from the Portuguese analyzes the nature of popular religion and the ways it was transferred to the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using richly detailed transcripts from Inquisition trials, Mello e Souza reconstructs how Iberian, indigenous, and African beliefs fused to create a syncretic and magical religious culture in Brazil.

Focusing on sorcery, the author argues that European traditions of witchcraft combined with practices of Indians and African slaves to form a uniquely Brazilian set of beliefs that became central to the lives of the people in the colony. Her work shows how the Inquisition reinforced the view held in Europe (particularly Portugal) that the colony was a purgatory where those who had sinned were exiled, a place where the Devil had a wide range of opportunities. Her focus on the three centuries of the colonial period, the multiple regions in Brazil, and the Indian, African, and Portuguese traditions of magic, witchcraft, and healing, make the book comprehensive in scope.

Stuart Schwartz of Yale University says, "It is arguably the best book of this genre about Latin America...all in all, a wonderful book." Alida Metcalf of Trinity University, San Antonio, says, "This book is a major contribution to the field of Brazilian history...the first serious study of popular religion in colonial Brazil...Mello e Souza is a wonderful writer."

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The History of the Devil

Vilém Flusser

University of Minnesota Press, 2014

In 1939, a young Vilém Flusser faced the Nazi invasion of his hometown of Prague. He escaped with his wife to Brazil, taking with him only two books: a small Jewish prayer book and Goethe’s Faust. Twenty-six years later, in 1965, Flusser would publish The History of the Devil, and it is the essence of those two books that haunts his own. From that time his life as a philosopher was born. While Flusser would later garner attention in Europe and elsewhere as a thinker of media culture, The History of the Devil is considered by many to be his first significant work, containing nascent forms of the main themes that would come to preoccupy him over the following decades.

In The History of the Devil, Flusser frames the human situation from a pseudo-religious point of view. The phenomenal world, or “reality” in a general sense, is identified as the “Devil,” and that which transcends phenomena, or the philosophers’ and theologians’ “reality,” is identified as “God.” Referencing Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in its structure, Flusser provocatively leads the reader through an existential exploration of nothingness as the bedrock of reality, where “phenomenon” and “transcendence,” “Devil” and “God” become fused and confused. So radically confused, in fact, that Flusser suggests we abandon the quotation marks from the terms “Devil” and “God.” At this moment of abysmal confusion, we must make the existential decisions that give direction to our lives.

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The History of the Devil

Vilém Flusser

University of Minnesota Press, 2027

A fascinating exploration into the early work of the celebrated philosopher of media culture and technology, Vilém Flusser

In 1939, a young Vilém Flusser faced the Nazi invasion of his hometown of Prague. He escaped with his wife to Brazil, taking with him only two books: a small Jewish prayer book and Goethe’s Faust. Twenty-six years later, in 1965, Flusser would publish The History of the Devil, and it is the essence of those two books that haunts his own. From that time his life as a philosopher was born. While Flusser would later garner attention in Europe and elsewhere as a thinker of media culture, The History of the Devil is considered by many to be his first significant work, containing nascent forms of the main themes that would come to preoccupy him over the following decades.

In The History of the Devil, Flusser frames the human situation from a pseudo-religious point of view. The phenomenal world, or “reality” in a general sense, is identified as the “Devil,” and that which transcends phenomena, or the philosophers’ and theologians’ “reality,” is identified as “God.” Referencing Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in its structure, Flusser provocatively leads the reader through an existential exploration of nothingness as the bedrock of reality, where “phenomenon” and “transcendence,” “Devil” and “God” become fused and confused. So radically confused, in fact, that Flusser suggests we abandon the quotation marks from the terms “Devil” and “God.” At this moment of abysmal confusion, and of the downfall of all values, we must make the existential decisions that give direction to our lives.

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