Reviews for The epic hero and the decline of heroic poetry

The average rating for The epic hero and the decline of heroic poetry based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-08 00:00:00 Mike Carter Lewis writes in his preface to The Screwtape Letters that "the devil is a liar." As my advisor puts it, Fish assumes here that readers of Paradise Lost won't remember that Satan is the father of lies. Fish in Is There a Text in This Class? (p. 21): "[T]he thesis of that book [Surprised by Sin] is that Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are. It follows, I argue, that the difficulties one experiences in reading the poem are not to be lamented or discounted but are to be seen as manifestations of the legacy left to us by Adam when he fell. Milton's strategy in the poem is to make the reader self-conscious about his own performance, to force him to doubt the correctness of his responses, and to bring him to the realization that his inability to read the poem with any confidence in his own perception is its focus." Here's W. Gardner Campbell's summary in "Temptation" in The Cambridge Companion to Paradise Lost (pp. 165-66): "The most influential solution to the problem of God's tempting his own creation [?] is offered in Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin. Fish believes that Paradise Lost is a kind of dramatic catechism, a moral education by means of temptation not only for Adam and Eve, but also for the reader. As we read the epic, according to Fish, we ourselves are tempted by the complexities of Milton's portrayal of temptation in ways that, if we are attentive to the bedrock assertions of Milton's theology, demonstrate to us again and again the realities of [our] own fallenness. For Fish, the fact that we find Milton's temptations problematic is the most compelling evidence possible that we are fallen ourselves; and Milton has structured his poem to bring us face-to-face with that compelling evidence over and over, thus continually surprising us with the irreducible sinfulness of our own fallen sensibilities. Unlike Blake or Empson, Fish offers a remarkably consistent Milton, so consistent that Fish could confidently title an anthology of his own Milton criticism How Milton Works, a title suggesting an exhaustive and definitive answer to our many questions." Rumrich takes aim at this work in his Milton Unbound. Peter Herman is happy to situate himself as an anti-Fish when it comes to Milton criticism. Kerrigan et al. offer a helpful summary in their introduction to Paradise Lost (somewhere around p. 280). Nigel Smith's Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? is aimed in large part at combating Fish's claim here ("that Milton was trying to induce sinful thoughts in his readers so that he could then teach them the error of their ways" [12]) and his claim in How Milton Works ("that Milton is the apologist for an ultimately theological and contained view of life" [12]). Ryken says in Milton's Paradise Lost, "Although not advertising itself as a Christian reading of the poem, it is the most influential Christian interpretation of Paradise Lost" (91). Apparently, Fish: - claims in this book that the plain style of Heaven is the teaching style, whereas the grand style of Hell is deceptive (see 6-7, 61, 89). That is to say, rhetoric/eloquence is essentially sophistry, and Christians ought to prefer logic. - reverses this claim in Self-Consuming Artifacts. - comes back to this claim in How Milton Works.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-08-30 00:00:00 Lewis Preston This is an over-long book full of untranslated blocks of French and Latin with some surprisingly good points, let me summarize them (the good points) for you: 1) Milton tries to educate the reader through PL by repeatedly 'tempting' them to misinterpret the poem then showing them how they're wrong through the epic voice or God's speeches 2) God has to be such a boring character because He was to be authoritative and fun rhetoric is not authoritative 3) the epic voice is not always reliable 4) Milton uses some words (e.g. 'fallen', 'wand'ring', etc) repeatedly very different contexts, it's useful to keep an eye on them 5) the corruption of language after the Fall is shown through double-entendres in Adam and Eve's speeches 6) the War in Heaven is a mock-epic meant to show the superiority of Christian heroism over conventional epic poems / 'pagan' heroism 7) rereading Paradise Lost (and Milton's other texts) does a lot more to help your understanding of the poem than reading a book about it. The fact that the chapters (more or less) follow the chronology of the poem and make it easier to read this alongside PL almost gained Fish an extra star, but then I remembered the appalling formatting of my edition.