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Title: Satan’s Secret Daughters: The Muse as Daemon
Author: Robert Oventile
Imprint: The Davies Group, Publishers
soft cover
406 pp.
USD 32.00
ISBN 978-1934542330
March 2014
Satan’s Secret Daughters explores the nihilistic fate of demonization that muses undergo in the wake of Christianity. Heraclitus names the
being calling us to our fates a daemon. Homer’s Iliad affirms Athena as Achilles’s daemonic muse. In Proverbs, Wisdom inspires God to let the creation be. But the New
Testament knows the daemonic as demonic, as being of Satan and so ultimately of nothingness. Displaced by Christ, Wisdom joins Athena in the exile into nothingness
that Christian monotheism would effect. However, Athena and Wisdom return in English literature as ambiguously daemonic and demonic muses who inspire their
votaries to grapple with nihilism.
Satan’s Secret Daughters tracks the fate of daemonic muses in Shakespeare’s Othello, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Melville’s Moby-Dick. Such muses come to an aging
mercenary (Othello), a prideful archangel (Satan), and a wounded sea-captain (Ahab), inspiring each toward an impossible restitution. Satan’s Secret Daughters concludes
with an examination of Sandy Florian’s The Tree of No, a culmination of and reply to the tradition of the demonized daemonic muse.
Table of Contents
Preface
One
Introduction: Ibsen’s Hilda as a Daemonic Muse
Two
Athena, Achilles’s Daemonic Muse
Three
Yahweh’s Daughter and Her Metamorphoses
Four
The Nihilistic Muse in Shakespeare’s Othello
Five
Milton’s Paradise Lost: Sin’s Ambition, Eve’s Flight
Six
Melville’s Moby-Dick: Sin Finds Her Throne
Seven
A Daemon Writes: Florian’s The Tree of No
Endnotes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author
Robert Savino Oventile (PhD, UC–Irvine) professes English at Pasadena City College. His publications include reviews and essays written for the journals Crossings,
American@, Culture Machine, Postmodern Culture, Comitatus, The Review of Communication, inside english, and Stirrings Still. He is the author of Impossible Reading:
Idolatry and Diversity in Literature (The Davies Group, Publishers).
Also of interest
By the same author:
Impossible Reading: Idolatry
and Diversity in Literature
soft cover
268 pp.
USD 26.00
ISBN 978-1934542033
February 2009