Author C. S. Lewis examines John Milton's "Paradise Lost" and the epic genre, discussing epic technique, subject matter, and style and the elements of Milton's story.

Includes a brief biography of the author, thematic and structural analysis of the work, critical views, and an index of themes and ideas.

This new reading of Milton's epic poem demonstrates how systematic patterns of allusion and keywords give structure and coherence to the individual books of Paradise Lost and to the overarching relationship among its books and episodes. It also shows how Milton radically revised the epic tradition and the Genesis story itself by arguing that it is better to create than destroy, by telling the reader to make love, not war, and by appearing to ratify...

First published thirty years ago, Stanley Fish's classic study of the role of reader response in Milton's Paradise Lost heralded a new era in Milton criticism an era in which one no longer needed to choose between Milton's orthodoxy or heresy. Rather, 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 reevaluate his or her judgment of Satan by being...

The seventeenth century saw some of the most important jurisprudential changes in England's history, yet the period has been largely overlooked in the rich field of literature and law. Helping to fill this gap, The Legal Epic is the first book to situate the great poet and polemicist John Milton at the center of late seventeenth-century legal history. Alison A. Chapman argues that Milton's Paradise Lost sits at the apex of the early modern period's...