Stanley Fish Critical Essay | Critical Review by Barbara K. Lewalski

Critical Review by Barbara K. Lewalski

SOURCE: A review of Surprised by Sin, in Journal of English and German Philology, Vol. 68, No. 3, July, 1969, pp. 517-21.

In the following review, Lewalski praises Fish's interpretation of Milton's Paradise Lost, but objects to his suggestion that the text works upon the reader's own sinfulness and demands an uncritical leap of faith.

The much-discussed interpretative cruxes in Paradise Lost—the heroism and magnificence of Satan in Books I and II, the sympathetic portrayal of Adam and Eve sinning, the unattractive harshness of God’s speeches in the Heavenly Council—have been viewed from two basic critical perspectives. William Empson, A. J. A. Waldock, and John Peter find a fundamental conflict between the human, psychologically valid responses evoked by the poem’s honestly presented dramatic scenes, and the commentary of the epic narrator which often counteracts or transvalues those responses under the pressure of the poem’s avowed didactic intention—to celebrate the intractable...
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