Surprised by Sin : The Reader in Paradise Lost

Fish, Stanley Eugene

ISBN 10: 067485747X / ISBN 13: 9780674857476

Editore: Harvard University Press, 2003

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Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Surprised by Sin : The Reader in Paradise Lost
• Editore: Harvard University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 067485747X
• ISBN 13: 9780674857476
• Rilegatura: Brossura
• Edizione: seconda edizione
• Condizione: New

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

In 1967 the world of Milton studies was divided into two armed camps: one proclaiming (in the tradition of Blake and Shelley) that Milton was of the devil's party with or without knowing it, the other proclaiming (in the tradition of Addison and C. S. Lewis) that the poet's sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him.

The achievement of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was to reconcile the two camps by subsuming their claims in a single overarching thesis: Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are--that is, fallen--and the poem's lesson is proven on a reader's impulse every time he or she finds a devilish action attractive or a godly action dismaying.

Fish's argument reshaped the face of Milton studies; thirty years later the issues raised in Surprised by Sin continue to set the agenda and drive debate.

Product Description

This text was first published in the 1960s, in an era that no longer saw the need to choose between Milton's orthodoxy and heresy. Rather, Stanley Fish allowed us to see the epic poem as a self-revelatory experience in which the reader is "intangled" in the folds of Satan's rhetoric and is forced to re-evaluate his or her judgment of Satan by being led to experience unreliability, inadequacy, or falseness of what had once seemed to be clear or true. In a new preface, Fish revisits the thesis of "Surprised by Sin" and considers the challenges offered by post-structuralism, late-20th-century historicism, and political criticism.