Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-216) and index.

Machine generated contents note: PRELUDE -- The Timeless Topicality of Myth -- PART ONE -- ANCIENT THEMES -- CHAPTER ONE -- Adam: The Genesis of Consciousness -- The Biblical Fall -- Near Eastern Sources -- The Paradox of Knowledge in Solomon'sJerusalem -- CHAPTER Two -- Prometheus: The Birth of Civilization -- Hesiod's Trickster -- Aeschylus's Culture-Hero -- From Boeotia to Athens -- CHAPTER THREE -- Faust: The Ambivalence of Knowledge -- The Historical Faust -- The Growth of the Legend -- The Chapbook Speculator -- Marlowe's Power Seeker -- INTERLUDE -- From Myth to Modernity -- PART TWO -- MODERN VARIATIONS -- CHAPTER FOUR -- The Secularization of Adam -- Candide's Fall -- The Typological Impulse -- Romantic Tragicomic Falls -- Modern Ironies -- CHAPTER FIVE -- The Proletarianization of Prometheus -- From Myth to Marx -- Modern Metaphors -- Marxist Myths -- GDR Ambiguities -- Three Major Re-Visions -- The Enemy of the People -- CHAPTER SIX -- The Americanization of Faust -- Modernizations of the Myth -- Faust and the Bomb -- Playful Fausts of the Fifties -- A Blue-Collar Faust -- Professorial Fausts -- Fausts of Politics and Poetry -- Fausts for the Nineties -- POSTLUDE -- On the Uses and Abuses of Myth -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.