Against the Grain Volume 25 | Issue 6 Article 41 2013 Collecting to the Core--Milton Studies and Surprised by Sin Cecile M. Jagodzinski Resources for College Libraries, [email protected] Anne Doherty CHOICE/ACRL, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atg Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation Jagodzinski, Cecile M. and Doherty, Anne (2013) "Collecting to the Core--Milton Studies and Surprised by Sin," Against the Grain: Vol. 25: Iss. 6, Article 41. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.7436 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. Order from the online library specialists Find more titles, get better service, build stronger collections Find it » Get it » Build it » More than hard-to-nd Put our library team Individual titles or match and out-of-print to work to help you hundreds on your want list Inventory of 140 Payment options, Replacement projects million books including purchase orders New and used items Consolidated, free, and Retrospective collection discounted shipping development Out-of-stock items from Talk to a real person Use online tools or have publisher or elsewhere Alibris order for you SPECIAL OFFER VISIT: www.alibris.com/library RECEIVE $15 OFF YOUR NEXT ORDER OF $100 OR MORE! CALL: 1-877-ALIBRIS USE COUPON CODE ATGJAN AT CHECKOUT EXPIRES FEBRUARY 28, 2014 EMAIL: [email protected] Collecting to the Core — Milton Studies and Surprised by Sin by Cecile M. Jagodzinski (British Literature Editor, Resources for College Libraries) <[email protected]> Column Editor: Anne Doherty (Resources for College Libraries Project Editor, CHOICE/ACRL) <[email protected]> Column Editor’s Note: The “Collecting speare, of course, but what about John Don- and 1674.2 It was published after the Res- to the Core” column highlights monographic ne, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Johnson, toration of the monarchy in England, fol- works that are essential to the academic li- Jane Austen, the Brontës, the Brownings, lowing years of civil war — years in which brary within a particular discipline, inspired Charles Dickens, and, of more recent vin- Milton stood on the side of the republicans by the Resources for College Libraries bib- tage, James Joyce, Nobel laureate Seamus as a prolific author of pamphlets opposing liography (online at http://www.rclweb.net). Heaney, or winners of the Man Booker Charles I and the royalists. Especially after In each essay, subject specialists introduce award? In order to escape the burden of such the publication of the fourth edition of Para- and explain the classic titles and topics that a choice, I am proposing a single core title, dise Lost, Milton was “known and celebrated continue to remain relevant to the undergrad- along with its associated referents, that has in England as the author of the national uate curriculum and library collection. Dis- had a profound influence onMilton studies: Protestant epic.”3 The poem was regarded ciplinary trends may shift, but some classics Stanley Fish’s Surprised by Sin: The Reader as a work of supreme sublimity, notable for never go out of style. — AD in Paradise Lost.1 Not only did this critical its aesthetics as well as its Christian mor- work change the way scholars thought about alism. Several positive critical appraisals, eaders, I hope, will pardon the cli- John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost; it commentaries, and explanations of the work ché, but writing on core monographs illustrates the way in which the critical tradi- appeared in the eighteenth century. in British literature, from the Old tion in literature evolves, and, more broadly, The critical winds shifted with the rise of R how scholarship operates as a conversation English period through the twenty-first cen- the Romantic movement in the nineteenth tury, provides one with an embarrassment between and among scholars. century. For William Blake and Percy of riches. Which period best represents the In order to set Fish’s work into its Bysshe Shelley, the poem’s key figure was strength and influence of British literature proper context, a brief history of the criti- not Adam, Eve, or God the Father or the Son, on literature as a whole, or on the literatures cal reception to Paradise Lost is in order. but Satan himself. Shelley, in the preface to of other parts of the globe? Which authors It was first published in 1667, with later his Prometheus Unbound, invokes Milton should one regard as preeminent? Shake- seventeenth-century editions in 1668, 1669, continued on page 70 Against the Grain / December 2013 - January 2014 <http://www.against-the-grain.com> 69 Milton’s poetry doesn’t mean very much.”10 notes that Eve’s “wanton” hair is not to be Collecting to the Core Ricks, who goes on to defend Milton and his taken as an indication of a predilection toward from page 69 poem, classifies the charges against Milton sin; we only read it that way because our fallen as misreadings and faults attributable to the natures cannot rightfully interpret “prelapsari- as “the inheritor of a republican tradition in poem’s stylistics.11 an vocabulary.” Fish also answers those who poetry” whose leaders, a new generation of C. S. Lewis was one of the few critics regard Satan as the hero of the poem; in one poets, sought to overcome tyranny. In A De- who countered the anti-Miltonists in his chapter, he distinguishes between Satan’s fence of Poetry, Shelley regards Satan as “the seminal work A Preface to Paradise Lost.12 “epic heroism” and true Christian heroism. Hero of Paradise Lost” because of the devil’s Immediate responses to Fish’s work were 4 His arguments became “dominant in Milton sheer “energy and magnificence.” The most scholarship” and contributed to a critical mixed. Rosalie Colie, in a review of the book, influential of the Romantics in the history of shift in readings of Milton’s work.13 Lewis says that Fish’s “stylistic, rhetorical, and for- Miltonic criticism, however, was William bases his reading in part on hierarchy and mal analyses of Paradise Lost go a long way Blake. Not only did he illustrate several of the natural superiority of God, as well as the to dissuade us that Milton was “affected by Milton’s works, but he famously remarked in disobedience which causes the Fall, ideas anti-Christian feelings,” as Empson et al. had The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton which surely would have been repugnant claimed. Both the seventeenth-century and “wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & 14 the twentieth-century “guilty reader” is drawn 5 to the Romantics to whom Lewis alludes. God and at liberty when of Devils & Hell.” Anticipating Fish, he contrasts the “unfallen into the poem to identify with Adam and Eve, Blake’s estimation is repeated throughout the sexual activity” of the early parts of the poem who are taken unawares by temptation and criticism surrounding Paradise Lost; indeed, with the fallen sexuality of the later sections Satan. Colie recognizes that Milton’s rhe- the character of Satan becomes the central fig- and argues that a “heroic” Satan is attractive torical strategies are meant to convey proper ure in what came to be known as “the Milton because an evil character is incomparably Christian doctrine.19 Barbara Lewalski, controversy,” and Satan presents Fish with easier to draw than a good one.15 It is easy to meanwhile, criticizes the reader-response the opportunity to make some of his strongest draw on the “bad passions” within ourselves; approach to the text: “Fish’s theologically arguments in Surprised by Sin. it is more difficult to imagine the best in grounded insistence upon the defects of the By the early twentieth century, the image ourselves “prolonged and more consistently ‘fallen’ readers deprives them of any basis for of Milton as a republican combatting tyranny embodied in action.”16 criticizing the poem: everything in the poem was replaced by a consideration of Milton the In Surprised by Sin, Fish responds to must be assumed to succeed entirely … for epic poet. The Latinate (and often obscure) Milton’s critics with an ingenious argument: whatever difficulties fallen readers encounter style of Paradise Lost was criticized by the must result from their own defects rather than that we find Satan and his rhetoric so attractive 20 modernists, including T. S. Eliot, William and God so forbidding because we, as readers, their author’s.” Lewalski’s general opinion Empson, Ezra Pound, and F. R. Leavis. To are fallen. Like Adam and Eve, we fall into of the book, however, is positive: she appreci- them, Milton’s God was a cruel tyrant who the trap of Satan’s magnificent speeches and ates Fish’s engagement with the epic similes simply gave long and boring speeches. In a (anti)heroic gestures precisely because we and style of the poem. John Peter Rumrich 1936 essay, Eliot opines that Paradise Lost have inherited the faults of our first parents. was one of Fish’s detractors, insisting that “is not serious poetry, not poetry fully occu- his work relies primarily on rhetoric, just as In the preface to the book, Fish summarizes 21 pied about its business, but rather a solemn his purpose: Satan does in the poem. But even Rum- game.”6 Noted (and formidable) critic F. R. rich, in a later article (within a footnote), My subject is Milton’s reader, and my Leavis does not mince words in his commen- admits to the legacy of Surprised by Sin and thesis, simply, that the uniqueness of taries on Milton and the pro-Milton camp.