The hero of the story is a demonic lover, dark, handsome, mysterious, and dangerously seductive. The heroine, beautiful, and innocent, willingly becomes his victim and is destroyed by him. This story of demon-lover and victim, always charged with passion, has been told over-and-over, from Greek mythology through contemporary fiction and films. Demon-Lovers and Their Victims in British Fiction is the first historical and structural exploration of the demon-lover motif, with emphasis on major works of British fiction from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, it will interest those concerned with gender role conflicts in literature and with the mutual influence of oral and written texts of folklore and formal literature.
