A01=Neil Forsyth
Ambrosiaster
Apocalypticism
Areopagitica
Arianism
Author_Neil Forsyth
Beelzebub
Belial
Brethren of the Free Spirit
Castration anxiety
Category=DC
Category=DSB
Category=DSC
Christian mortalism
Christian views on hell
Church Fathers
Contra Celsum
Damnation
Demonology
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
False god
False prophet
Faust
Felix culpa
Fraticelli
Gematria
God
God Knows (novel)
Hamartia
Hellmouth
Heresy
Heresy in Christianity
Hubris
Juvenal
Lactantius
Laocoon
Lucifer and Prometheus
Mammon
Manichaeism
Mario Praz
Mephistopheles
Mock-heroic
Odysseus' scar (Auerbach)
Paradise of Fools
Parody
Poetry
Problem of evil
Prometheus Unbound (Shelley)
Protevangelium
Pun
Puritans
Quibble (plot device)
Reprobation
Revenge tragedy
Ridicule
Romanticism
Samael
Samson Agonistes
Satan
Satanic Verses
Satanism
Simile
Smirk
Soren Kierkegaard
Superiority (short story)
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The Political History of the Devil
The Pursuit of the Millennium
Theodicy
Theology
Trojan War
Valentinian (play)
War in Heaven
Warfare
Wickedness
William Ames
Product details
- ISBN 9780691113395
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 29 Dec 2002
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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).
