The Satanic Epic [Paperback]

The Satan ofParadise Losthas fascinated generations of readers. This book attempts to explain how and why Milton's Satan is so seductive. It reasserts the importance of Satan against those who would minimize the poem's sympathy for the devil and thereby make Milton orthodox.

Neil Forsyth argues that William Blake got it right when he called Milton a true poet because he was of the Devils party even though he set out to justify the ways of God to men. In seeking to learn why Satan is so alluring, Forsyth ranges over diverse topics--from the origins of evil and the relevance of witchcraft to the status of the poetic narrator, the epic tradition, the nature of love between the sexes, and seventeenth-century astronomy. He considers each of these as Milton introduces them: as Satanic subjects.

Satan emerges as the main challenge to Christian belief. It is Satan who questions and wonders and denounces. He is the great doubter who gives voice to many of the arguments that Christianity has provoked from within and without. And by rooting his Satanic reading ofParadise Lostin Biblical and other sources, Forsyth retrieves not only an attractive and heroic Satan but a Milton whose heretical energies are embodied in a Satanic character with a life of his own.

"Winner of the 2004 Holly Hanford Award, The Milton Society of America"Neil Forsythis Professor of English Literature at the University of Lausanne and the author ofThe Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth(Princeton). The Satanic Epicestablishes Forsyth as our foremost scholar of Satan as a literary and cultural phenomenon. . . .The Satanic Epicis useful not only as a deft and fascinating reading of the most 'imposing' character inParadise Lostbut as a history of Satanic interpretation from the ancient world onward to Milton's own time. . . . Forsyth's scholarship re-creates and redefines the milieu out of which Milton's works elC&