Not Just Zarathustra: Revising Biblical Myth within the Modern Prophetic Epic in Iwan Gilkin’s Jonas (1990)

Abstract

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra has exerted a great influence in literature, having consecrated a type of epics that could be named prophetic, where the hero is a wise man who presents his doctrines and his visions of the future. One the works inspired by Nietzsche’s literary masterpiece is Jonas (1900), by Belgian Iwan Gilkin, where a new Jonah warns a New Nineveh against the economic “yellow danger”. The myth of Jonah is updated with an intense emotional effect thanks to the vehemence of the biblical verse. A broad recourse to irony introduces an interesting ambiguity in this work by Gilkin