Description: First published thirty years ago, Stanley Fish's classic study of the role of reader response in Milton's Paradise Lost heralded a new era in Milton criticism an era in which one no longer needed to choose between Milton's orthodoxy or heresy. Rather, 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 reevaluate his or her judgment of Satan by being led to experience the unreliability, inadequacy, or falseness of what had once seemed to be clear or true. In a new Preface, Fish revists the thesis of Surprised by Sin and considers the challenges offered by post-structuralism, new historicism, and political criticism. He does not repent.

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