Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost

by Stanley Fish

Overview

In 1967 the world of Milton studies was divided into two armed camps, one proclaiming that Milton was of the devil's party, the other proclaiming 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 and therefore the fact of their divided responses makes perfect sense. Thirty years later the issues raised in Surprised by Sin continue to set the agenda and drive debate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780333625163
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	11/12/1997
Series:	Reader in Paradise Lost
Edition description:	Second Edition 1997
Pages:	361
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Stanley Fish is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His many books include There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing Too.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements - Preface to the Second Edition - Preface - Not So Much a Teaching as an Intangling - The Milk of the Pure Word - Man's Polluting Sin - Standing Only: Christian Heroism - The Interpretative Choice - What Cause?: Faith and Reason - So God with Man Unites - Appendices - Index

What People are Saying About This

Linda Gregerson

Thirty years after its original publication, Surprised by Sin remains the one indispensable book on Milton. . .And, lest we thought its rigorous injunctions had been dulled or blandly assimilated by the intervening years, Dish dares us, in a formidable new preface, to think again. -- University of Michigan