Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost [Hardcover]

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.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