The first comprehensive book on the story of Cain and Abel, this brilliant work traces the changes in the way people have looked at a master metaphor of our culture. Era by era, from the writings of the classical Christian epoch up to East of 'Eden and Amadeus, from Philo to Einnegans Wake, Ricardo Quiñones examines the historical and cultural contexts within which this universal myth is significant. What emerges is a forceful and embracing history of ideas that is also a profound meditation on the "fragility of the human compact."
More than a thematic study, The Changes of Cain explores the inner resources and radiating energies of the biblical story and its eventual grand alliances with the foundation sacrifice in the classical epoch and with the double in the Romantic period. The theme is powerful because it constantly addresses a fracture in existence, and it is long-lasting because it is so open to divergent responses. Probably no characters out of our composite mythology have undergone such startling and related transformations as have Cain and Abel. Quiñones defines the essential qualities of the Cain-Abel story and shows how they not only endure within change but actually give birth to radically opposed interpretations.
"Ricardo Quiñones takes us on a grand tour of Western civilization in his admirable book, which reveals the riches of the Cain-Abel story as it develops from its Biblical origin to Citizen Kane and Michel Tournier. This is cultural history and literary criticism of the first order, finely written, formidably but gracefully erudite, and illustrating the capacity of Judeo-Christian culture and the modernity emerging from it constandy to criticize the darker side of its own foundations and realizations. It is a major contribution to the present ongoing debate about the humanities, but transcends argument by the depth of its historical insights."
—Joseph Frank
"Changes of Cain is a remarkable combination of textual analysis, mythologie interpretation, and sociocultural and historical speculation. Ricardo Quiñones argues that the myth of the first family offers a unique perspective on the 'ambiguities of human action' and the 'full complexities of historical change,' one which has been continuous in human consciousness since the Biblical era. This claim seems to me not at all excessive. Quinones's exceptionally interesting book is, as far as I know, the first comprehensive work on this universal myth." —Warner Berthoff
Ricardo J. Quiñones is Josephine Olp Weeks Professor of English and Comparative Literatures, and Director of the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. He is the author of The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Harvard), Dante Alighieri (Twayne), and Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development (Princeton).
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments Introduction 3
Part One: The Three Traditions
Chapter One Citizen Cain 23
Chapter Two Monstrous Cain 41
Chapter Three
Cain as Sacred Executioner 62
Part Two: Regenerate Cain
Chapter Four
Byron's Cain and Its Antecedents 87
Chapter Five The Secret Sharer 109
Chapter Six Demian 122
Chapter Seven
The New American Cain: East of Eden and Other Works of Post-World War II America 135
Part Three: Dramas of Envy
Chapter Eight Billy Budd 155
Chapter Nine
Amadeus and Prick Up Your Ears 167
Chapter Ten Abel Sanchez 173
Part Four: Tomorrow's Cain
Chapter Eleven
Cain of Future History 185
Chapter Twelve
Twinning the Twain 215
Epilogue 238
Notes 249
Index 279
