文档介绍：Milton and Paradise Lost
Yuan Xuemei
Foreign Languages Department
Milton’s Life and Writings
Family: Puritan
Education: Cambridge
Marriage:royalist wife, separation
Political Career: writing political phamphlets, imprisonment after the restoration
Writings: pamphlets on marriage, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, the last three finished after his blindness
Paradise Lost
Milton’s masterpiece is Paradise Lost, an epic in 12 books written in blank verse (a verse form of unrhymed iambic pentameter lines). The stories were taken from the Old Testament: the creation, the rebellion in Heaven of Satan and his fellow-angels, their defeat and expulsion from heaven; the creation of the earth and of Adam and Eve, the fallen angels in hell plotting against God, Satan’s temptation of Eve, and the departure of Adam and Eve from Eden.
The Theme of the Epic
At the outset of the poem, the poem tells that it was written “to justify the ways of God to man,” that is, to advocate submission to the almighty. But the epic gradually turns away to tell the revolt against God’s authority.
Satan as the Hero of the Epic
Although Paradise Lost was written by John Milton more than three centuries ago, it remains an important fixture in the Western literary canon, and its central subject continues to be a cause for scholarly debate: Is Satan a heroic figure and more importantly, how can Satan be described as an epic hero ? While this question has occupied literary critics and scholars for generations, this question remains controversial, for it provokes responses that arise from closely held religious or moral values, on the one hand, and mitment to strict literary interpretation, on the other.
a figure, generally a man, who is a fundamentally good person confronting challenges and ing them essfully.
In Paradise Lost, however, this hero archetype is pletely, especially by the character of Satan. All of the characters plex, containing contradictory dualities.
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