Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost"

This text was first published in the 1960s, in an era that no longer saw the need to choose between Milton's orthodoxy and heresy. Rather, Stanley Fish allowed us to see the epic poem as a self-revelatory experience in which the reader is "intangled" in the folds of Satan's rhetoric and is forced to re-evaluate his or her judgment of Satan by being led to experience unreliability, inadequacy, or falseness of what had once seemed to be clear or true. In a new preface, Fish revisits the thesis of "Surprised by Sin" and considers the challenges offered by post-structuralism, late-20th-century historicism, and political criticism.