BiblioVault - Books about Fall of man in literature

After Innocence

Visions of the Fall in Modern Literature

Terry Otten

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982

The fear of falling, the awareness of lost innocence, lost illusions, lost hopes and intentions, of civilization in decline—these are the themes which link literature to theology, both concerned with the shape of human destiny. Otten discusses the continuing viability of the myth of the Fall in literature. He relates a wide variety of romantic and modern works to fundamental issues in modern Christianity.

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Milton's Epic Voice

The Narrator in Paradise Lost

Anne Ferry

University of Chicago Press, 1983

Although Paradise Lost is one of the greatest poems in the English language, it is also among the most difficult and intimidating, especially to unsophisticated readers. One of the most accessible critical studies of Paradise Lost—and one frequently recommended by those teaching Milton—is Anne Ferry's Milton's Epic Voice.

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The Spider in the Cup

Yoknapatawpha County’s Fall into the Unknowable

Barbara H. Fried

Harvard University Press, 1978

Barbara Fried presents here a refined feminist reading of the sharply divergent attitudes toward knowledge attributed to men and women in Faulkner’s fiction. Against a backdrop of the first Fall, the author traces the process by which Faulkner’s men embrace a state of non-being and his women a life of greater knowledge in their twentieth-century fall into the unknowable. Drawing on the main body of Faulkner’s work with close attention to The Sound and the Fury, this richly conceived and gracefully written study animates in a new way the work of one of America’s foremost writers.

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Surprised by Sin

The Reader in Paradise Lost, Second Edition with a New Preface

Stanley Fish

Harvard University Press, 1998

In 1967 the world of Milton studies was divided into two armed camps: one proclaiming (in the tradition of Blake and Shelley) that Milton was of the devil's party with or without knowing it, the other proclaiming (in the tradition of Addison and C. S. Lewis) that the poet's sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him.

The achievement of Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was to reconcile the two camps by subsuming their claims in a single overarching thesis: Paradise Lost is a poem about how its readers came to be the way they are--that is, fallen--and the poem's lesson is proven on a reader's impulse every time he or she finds a devilish action attractive or a godly action dismaying.

Fish's argument reshaped the face of Milton studies; thirty years later the issues raised in Surprised by Sin continue to set the agenda and drive debate.

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