Paradise Lost - 9780367142933

Taylor & Francis

First published in 1980. Paradise Lost was once a favourite text for family reading; today it is confined to the educational system, which treats it as an object to be investigated rather than a subject that demands response. Professor Hunter writes inevitably for an audience of literary students, but he invites them to consider Paradise Lost as a text that must be enjoyed before it can be explained. He understands the need to explain complexities, but is mainly concerned with the onward flow of our engagement with an ancient poem. Milton\u2019s narrative technique is explored as a system which both encourages and frustrates our native sense of story. His poetic power is shown to grow from our assent to its brilliant evocation of \""as if\"" fictions. Milton is a master of audience manipulation, of dramatic tension and intellectual paradox. These characteristics are described in the context of the task the poem sets itself to tell the untellable and describe what no man has ever seen. .