"Incest, Blood, Shame. Are They Not Enough to Make One Feel Sinful?": Miltonic Figurations of Incest and Disobedience in Philip Roth's American Pastoral
{"title":"\"Incest, Blood, Shame. Are They Not Enough to Make One Feel Sinful?\": Miltonic Figurations of Incest and Disobedience in Philip Roth's American Pastoral","authors":"Rl Goldberg","doi":"10.5703/philrothstud.16.1.0033","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This article considers, as its starting point, Roth's indebtedness in American Pastoral (1997) to John Milton's Paradise Lost. In particular, this article is concerned with representations of incest in both texts. Drawing on Milton's cosmology, Roth in American Pastoral situates father-daughter incest as the primary scene of destruction. Further, this essay considers the strange positing of incest in Zuckerman's fictional account of the Swede and the foundational status incest is accorded in the problem of undoing the pastoral. Narratively foundational, incest in this novel is for Roth, as it is for Milton, chronologically inseparable from the failures of the liberal state; that is, incest becomes a metonym for the paradise lost.","PeriodicalId":37093,"journal":{"name":"Philip Roth Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2020-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Philip Roth Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5703/philrothstud.16.1.0033","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"Arts and Humanities","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
ABSTRACT:This article considers, as its starting point, Roth's indebtedness in American Pastoral (1997) to John Milton's Paradise Lost. In particular, this article is concerned with representations of incest in both texts. Drawing on Milton's cosmology, Roth in American Pastoral situates father-daughter incest as the primary scene of destruction. Further, this essay considers the strange positing of incest in Zuckerman's fictional account of the Swede and the foundational status incest is accorded in the problem of undoing the pastoral. Narratively foundational, incest in this novel is for Roth, as it is for Milton, chronologically inseparable from the failures of the liberal state; that is, incest becomes a metonym for the paradise lost.
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
分享
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
扫码关注我们
