Publisher's Synopsis
Allen reevaluates the Historia von D. Johann Fausten as a work of formulaic fiction which inverts the structural pattern of the medieval saints' legends, subverting Catholic values in favor of Lutheran ones. This reevaluation makes possible a new reading of Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus. Mann adopted the Historia's basic structural pattern of hagiography-antihagiography and rewrote the Faustian pact as Nietzschean ressentiment period. Mann recognized that the Historia had a montage technique of its own and this substantially affected the development of his montage technique in Doktor Faustus.
