From another perspective, the poem Paradise Lost is initialized by a focus on the beginning of the world, which was intended to be a paradise. God intention was to make the earth a paradise for his creations. However, such was lost along the way after the fall of Satan from heaven. Nonetheless, the poet tries to be truthful by using the Holy Spirit to imply his allegations as truthful.
Your introductory paragraph should do two things: introduce your reader to your topic and present your thesis. It is important to distinguish in your mind between your topic -- what you will write about -- and your thesis -- what you will argue or attempt to prove. A thesis may be defined as an interpretation that you set forth in specific terms and propose to defend or demonstrate by reasoned argumentation and literary analysis. Your thesis, then, is the position that you are attempting to persuade your reader to accept.
literary analysis essay on paradise lost
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While there has been a great deal of interest over the last several years in the relationship between Renaissance literature and the rhetoric of colonialism, and while at the same time there has been a dramatic renewal of interest in Milton's politics, surprisingly little has been written on Milton and colonialism. The most important exception is David Quint's recent book, Epic and Empire (1993). Quint, who approaches the issue through a somewhat ambivalently postmodern analysis of the political implications of genre, comes to the conclusion that the Milton of Paradise Lost is a poet against empire. In this essay I wish to challenge Quint's reading in order to suggest how exactly and to what extent Paradise Lost authorizes colonial activity even while it satirizes the abuses of early modern colonialism.2
Reviewed by: Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and Religion East and West Marianna Benetatou (bio) Anthony C. Yu . Comparative Journeys: Essays on Literature and Religion East and West. Masters of Chinese Studies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. xix, 408 pp. Hardcover $55.00, ISBN 978-0-231-14326-4. Reading Anthony C. Yu's Comparative Journeys is a cross-cultural and cross-historical-journey with scarce, if any, comparison to previous works of its kind. If a good part of the book primarily addresses the specialist or student of literature and/or religions, the last section broadens the debate to include contemporary issues that can be of interest to all culturally minded persons. This masterpiece of erudition, rigorous analysis, and expert choice of timeless topics consists of a series of essays reflecting the rich academic career of the author. Its subtle architecture becomes more intricate by the very nature of the subject matter, the interconnectedness of literature and religion. As the introductory essay convincingly argues, world literature has played a significant, albeit not always acknowledged, role in crystallizing and implementing religious doctrines. Furthermore, religious inspiration is not always limited to fragmentary references, but, as the subsequent essays abundantly make clear, may take the form of a coherent project where literary appreciation is inextricable from knowledge of a specific religious corpus. The common thread running through the seemingly disparate essays is, as the writer declares right from the beginning, the awareness of change in all its proceedings.
The essays on Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained explore, by means of thorough textual analysis, change as the universal force that governs humanity and, at least in the first case, divinity alike. The fall may be brutal, controversial, or unjust to the limited human intelligence, but it cannot be an end in itself. It puts in motion the slow process of spiritual education soliciting, by that matter, divine mediation. The final reconciliation with divinity in the now lost Prometheus the Fire Bringer or the promise of redemption [End Page 284] in Paradise Regained points to the salutary effects of change. These essays prefigure a pattern of change illustrated in subsequent chapters, particularly in the final section of the book: The meeting of two alien cultures is never painless or neutral, but it causes tension and sometimes conflict. However, in retrospection, the initially waning side, in the long term, gets the most considerable benefits. Enriched by a salutary contact, it gains impetus to transform the inherent weakness into strength and, thus, faces contemporary challenges in new and innovative ways. Therefore, change brings progress.
Change and transcendence are themes at the core of the next group of essays. Dante's Divina Commedia and Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West (Xiyouji) are compared as prominent and significant examples of literary sacred pilgrimages. Patiently unraveling the sacred allegory behind the exquisite fiction, the author, widely known for his masterful translation of the Journey, brings to light unsuspected and, at first glance, surprising correlations. Avoiding oversimplification for the sake of compatibility, he makes clear that the human quest for transcendence has been interpreted in different contexts according to a referential religious discourse, be it fourteenth-century Christianity or Buddhism tinged by substantial doses of Daoist physiological alchemy. Theology is further enacted in lively episodes structuring the progression of the story and culminating in the final crescendo, the vision of God (Commedia) or enlightenment (Journey). From a strictly theological point of view, the comparison is definitely convincing. However, what is left out of the comparative frame is also worth discussing. For example, the lofty, human-centric and, by many accounts, secular poem of Dante and the fantastic satire of Wu, reveal not only different sensibilities but also different evaluations of religion. The reader may gain further insight into the comparative project by exploring the reasons motivating such a degree of sophistication and the poets' attitude with respect to their individual religious background. 2ff7e9595c
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