The Satanic Epic

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Princeton University Press, 2003 - 382 páginas

The Satan of Paradise Lost has 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 of Paradise Lost in 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.

Dentro del libro

Contenido

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SATAN
24
1 The Old Enemy
25
2 Ancient Myth and Epic
28
3 Hesiod
30
4 Apocalypses
35
5 The satan
37
6 The New Testament
39
7 The Early Church
43
3 The Problem of Evil
192
4 Satan and Ancient Evils
195
Hells Fury
196
6 The Darkness of Hell
201
7 God created evil
204
8 The Language of Sin
206
9 Evil Eve
207
10 Openings
209

8 Heresy
45
9 Medieval Heresy
49
10 Old English Genesis to Chaucer
50
11 Satans Rebellion
54
12 Warfare and Imperialism
56
13 Elizabethan Drama
60
14 Politics
62
15 The Miltonic Moment
64
16 Subversive Satan
66
17 Critical Controversies
69
THE EPIC VOICE
77
2 Hope and Despair
81
3 Dark designs
86
4 Devils into Dwarfs
87
S The Critical Need for the Narrator
90
6 Epic Similes
100
7 Erring
105
8 Parliamentary Devils
108
FOLLOW THE LEADER
114
1 Chaos
115
2 Approaching Paradise
124
3 Satans Entry into Paradise
129
5 Sex
134
MY SELF AM HELL
147
1 Niphates
148
2 Faustus and the Abyss
152
3 God in Satan
155
4 Hell in Heaven
157
5 Witchcraft
160
SATANS REBELLION
167
1 Rebellion in Hesiod
170
2 Gods Creative Word
171
3 Satans Theology
176
4 Sources of Satans Motive
180
5 Hebrews
183
6 Psalm 2
185
THE LANGUAGE OF EVIL
188
2 Hate in Heaven
190
11 Perverse
212
12 Odium Dei
214
OF MANS FIRST DIS
217
1 Dis
218
2 Satans dark suggestions
221
3 Quibbles
224
4 Vergil
228
S Ovid
229
6 Dante
233
7 Difference
235
HOMER IN MILTON THE ATTENDANCE MOTIF AND THE GRACES
239
SATAN TEMPTER
259
2 Stupidly good
261
3 Sexual Serpents
263
4 Discourse
265
5 The Seductive Text
268
6 Commentators
272
7 What delight
277
8 Satans Sewers
280
9 Satanic Verses
282
IF THEY WILL HEAR
285
AT THE SIGN OF THE DOVE AND SERPENT
301
1 Irenaeus
303
2 The Wisdom of the Serpent
304
3 Image
305
4 The Brazen Serpent
308
5 The Meaning of History
309
6 Christ and Serpent
311
THE STRUCTURES OF PARADISE LOST
314
SIGNS PORTENTOUS
329
2 Disastrous twilight
332
3 Editors
338
4 SunSon
341
5 Reading Signs
342
6 Good with bad expect to hear
344
BIBLIOGRAPHY
349
INDEX
371
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Acerca del autor (2003)

Neil Forsyth is Professor of English Literature at the University of Lausanne and the author of The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton).

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