/lit/ - Literature

"When Dante, the weary middle-aged pilgrim, finally reaches the lowest pit of Hell in The Inferno, he encounters Satan, who is, to this reader’s great disappointment, a pitiable figure: The once-mighty angel is powerless, inert, frozen in ice up to his chest, incapable of speech or action or motion or even malice. He is a slobbering, jibbering precursor to H. P. Lovecraft’s “blind idiot god,” more of a force of nature than a personality. He does nothing; he just is... Milton’s Lucifer is on fire. In Paradise Lost, Lucifer is not some pathetic figure reduced to an eternal spasm in the service of God’s unalterable program. Milton’s Lucifer is the hero of Paradise Lost, albeit a tragic hero, a lively figure—an individual. He insisted upon his own mind and his own judgment, even at the cost of Paradise lost. Lucifer, too, is a partisan of the smallest minority...Dante’s Satan has no will and no individuality; Milton’s Lucifer has a surfeit of it. He did wrong, of course, meeting with disobedience the one Force in the universe to Whom his obedience was rightfully owed. But there is in Milton’s Lucifer a recognition that there is something splendid in the spirit of disobedience. Dante’s Satan is a thing. Milton’s Lucifer is one of us, alive, a personality, an individual—a traitor."

Any recommendations on books or articles about depictions of the Devil or Hell?