The Devil as Muse

Beautifully written, effortlessly involving and engaging, The Devil as Muse is, like many of the books that it deals with, a great triumph of the ethical imagination. Parker brilliantly combines great literary sensitivity with good, clear, honest feeling—a work of Socratic imagination and humanity.

~Gregory Dart, Senior Lecturer, University College of London

Fred Parker has established himself as one of our shrewdest and most sensitive commentators on eighteenth-century literature. In The Devil as Muse he looks backwards (to Milton) and forwards (to Goethe, Blake, Byron, Thomas Mann, and Mikhail Bulgakov) in a searching, wide-ranging investigation—as compulsively readable as it is subtly nuanced—of the complex and equivocal relations between diabolism and literary inspiration. It is a fascinating inquiry into some of the most profound and mysterious sources of literary creativity.

~David Hopkins, Professor of English Literature, Bristol University

Fred Parker breathes new life into a very old question: Where is the Devil in the creative process? His study is a model of unobtrusive scholarship and literary sympathy.

~Felicity Rosslyn, author of Alexander Pope: A Literary Life