His unconditional desire for knowledge made "Faust" the symbolic figure of the modern period. Since the Renaissance, a rich Faust-literature, ranging from Marlowe, Goethe, and up to Thomas Mann, has portrayed the highly conflictual emancipation of knowledge from theology as well as the self-assertion of a modern knowledge of nature and the human being.

The encyclopedic form is essential to the history of knowledge and also constantly changed by it. The traditional claim of an encyclopedia is to itemize all objects of knowledge, ultimately representing them as a tangible whole. To do so, however, aesthetic and poetic strategies are employed that effectively produce such totality.