Lorna Fitzsimmons - Faust Adaptations from Marlowe to Aboudoma and Markland

Faust Adaptations from Marlowe to Aboudoma and Markland takes a comparative cultural studies approach to the Faust legend. Comparative cultural studies is a contextual, globally oriented approach, drawing on the methods of cultural studies and comparative literature. The book provides an interdisciplinary and intercultural vantage point on the Faust theme as it has been adapted in some key texts from the early modern period to the present. Examining English, German, Dutch, and Egyptian adaptations of the Faust theme analytically and contextually, it consists of articles on the Faust works of Christopher Marlowe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Adelbert von Chamisso, Byron, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Mann, D. J. Enright, Konrad Boehmer, Mahmoud Aboudoma, Bridge Markland, Andreas Gssling, and Uschi Flacke. These studies demonstrate not only the enduring meaningfulness of the Faust concept, but also its adaptability to different genres, eras, and cultures.

The legend of the early modern scholar, Faustus, who compacts his soul to the devil, arose in the context of the Reformation in Germany. Since then, a broad range of adaptations of the legend have been rendered in literature, drama, music, and visual and mixed media. As a result, the Faust theme has become one of the most important in Western history and is more and more global in its audiences and adaptation. As David C. John observes in this book, in his article on Egyptian playwright and director Mahmoud Aboudomas recent Faustian adaptation, although the Faust figure himself is correctly understood to be first and foremost quintessentially German, through centuries of reception and adaptation he has come to represent the struggling human in many lands and cultures (see ).

The Egypt of Aboudoma is necessarily far removed from that of the Reformation circumstances in which the Faust theme first emerged in the sixteenth century. The anonymous Faust Book, the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus), is a product of religious conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Western Europe. Its satire of Catholicism is pointed. The protagonist Faustus is a learned scholar who turns to illicit arts and is eventually damned. Faustus is an object of derision and amusement as he undertakes travels and indulges in pranks, usually forgetful of the ultimate, hell-bound fate of his soul. The book engages with abstract concepts and questions of universal import: human relations to divinity, the afterlife, freedom, social mobility, love, repentance, and professional integrity. It was widely read and translated, and its popularity invited its adaptation. The English playwright Christopher Marlowes tragic adaptation,