San Antonio College Library

Taking the culturally resonant motif of the descent to the underworld as his guiding thread. David L. Pike traces the interplay between myth and history in medieval and modernist literature. Passage through Hell suggests new approaches to the practices of comparative literature, and a possible escape from the current morass of competing critical schools and ideologies. Pike's readings of Louis-Ferdinand Celine and Walter Benjamin reveal the tensions...

Puritan theology maintained the "men need to be terrified, so that they may be converted." Yet the fear of self-loss at the heart of religious conversion was, oddly enough, similar to the fear provoked by witchery and demonic possession. Thus terror entered American culture partly by way of religious sanction, and it continues to be an important social tool for the shaping of hearts and minds. This book defines the use of terror in the American popular...