Literature
- Dante Alighieri's famous epic poem Divine Comedy tells how he visits Heaven and Hell. His visit to Hell is probably the most famous literary depiction of the concept. Hell has its entrance in the Northern hemisphere, the other side of the world to Purgatory, and the bottom of Hell is at the Centre of the Earth. Hell is systematically divided in thematical tortures for crimes of the same nature in its Nine Circles, for example people violent against others are trapped in the Seventh Circle of Hell in a boiling river of blood with centaurs firing arrows to keep them in their place. The people are judged by the Serpentine Minos. Hell was created by Lucifer's fall, he is now trapped in the final level for Traitors. Hell is surrounded by the river Acheron, the neutral sit on the banks chased by swarms of insects and running after a banner. Dante claims to have seen several famous people being tortured in hell: biblical characters (Judas, Cain, ...), mythological characters (Medusa, Minotaur,...), historical characters (Nero, Brutus, Attila the Hun,...) and people of his own lifetime. His journey is described with many imaginative details.
- In Milton's Paradise Lost, Lucifer and the other fallen angels (such as Beelzebub, Belial, and Molech) are imprisoned in Hell for rebelling against God after the birth of Christ. Hell is Nine days' fall from Heaven and three times further than Earth. Between it and the Universe are Chaos and Night. In Hell, the fallen angels build Pandaimoneum. Hell's gate is guarded by Sin, Satan's daughter. In Book 10 a bridge is built from Hell to Earth by Sin and Death after the Fall of Man, which has been caused by Lucifer, while the Fallen angels are turned into snakes.
- In Piers Anthony's series Incarnations of Immortality, Hell, along with Heaven and Purgatory, are actual locations populated by the main characters and souls of the dead.
- Wayne Barlowe's book, Gods Demon, is set in Hell and follows the endeavors of a powerful Demon, Sargatanas, to achieve redemption. The hell depicted is in many ways the classical Christian perception of burning cities and desolate wastelands with souls being routinely tortured.
- Stephen King suggests that Hell is repetition in his short story, "That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is in French". The story focuses on a woman who is forced to repeat the first hours of her and her husband's doomed second honeymoon over and over.
- In the novel City Infernal by Edward Lee, Hell is depicted as a modern metropolis (the Mephistopolis), albeit where bones are currency and electricity is provided by tapping the bio-electricity of tortured souls.
- Emanuel Swedenborg wrote Heaven and Hell in which he claimed to have visited Hell.
Read more about this topic: Hell In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and given them an idea of something better. A better state of one’s feelings or simply the idea of a silence in one’s self that allows one to think or to feel. Which to me is the same.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not a distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,—nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign,—is it not? of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and the feet.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)