Are we either good or bad, and do we really know the difference? Why do we want what we cannot have, and even to be what we’re not? Can we desire others without wanting to possess them? Can we open to others and not risk possession ourselves? And where, in these cases, do we draw the line?

Ewan Fernie argues that the demonic tradition in literature offers a key to our most agonised and intimate experiences. The Demonic ranges across the breadth of Western culture, engaging with writers as central and various as Luther, Shakespeare, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Melville and Mann.

A powerful foreword by Jonathan Dollimore brings out its implications as an intellectual and stylistic breakthrough into new ways of writing criticism. Fernie unfolds an intense and personal vision, not just of Western modernity, but of identity, morality and sex. As much as it’s concerned with the great works, this is a book about life.
Reviews

"Provocative and profound – a thrilling and radical account of the allure of the demon in us all." Salley Vickers, author of Miss Garnet’s Angel

"Ewan Fernie's study of the demonic in canonical literature is an original and exciting work of scholarship. Beautifully written, and continuously engaging, this book surprises the reader at almost every turn with insights into literature that remain in the mind and change how we think of poems and narratives we thought we knew well." Kevin Hart, Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia, USA

"That the word "evil" contains within itself the word "live" is merely a lexical accident, but that the demonic might yet reveal what it means to truly or finally live is the profound mystery at the heart of Ewan Fernie's book, which, in brilliantly ranging right across the Western literary canon, succeeds in alerting us to the sheer vitality in our cultural inheritance of demonic experience, or what Fernie calls the "life that is opposed ". And in this life-against-life Fernie finds or senses a way of being-in-the-world that we might not only dare to call truly human but even, perhaps and paradoxically, good or divine."John Schad, Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Lancaster, UK

"With dazzling range and depth, Ewan Fernie has tackled a subject that we ignore at our peril: the demonic. He not only mines cultural resources—from Luther to Kierkegaard, from Marlowe to Dostoevsky, from Nietzsche to Schreber—to examine the experience of the demonic, but more: with his compelling prose, Fernie manages to create the experience of the demonic for us. This is not a book for the faint of heart. It reveals the relationship of the demonic to contemporary thought on negativity, to the darkness of possession, and to the transcendence of the sacred, showing that 'sainthood is perilously close to damnation'. This book immeasurably enhances our understanding of the problem of evil." Regina M. Schwartz, Pr...