About this book

Evariste-Désiré de Parny, though largely forgotten now, was well known in the nineteenth century for his lyric poems, especially the Poésies Erotiques (1778-81), and the prose-poems in Chansons Madécasses (1787). He also wrote much humorous verse, including the anti-religious La Guerre des Dieux (1799) and Le Paradis perdu (1805). The latter is a parody of Milton’s Paradise Lost in four relatively short cantos. It gives a central place to the War in Heaven, casting Satan as a revolutionary. It is highly entertaining in itself, and also an important example of parody as critical response to an original text.

This edition also provides an accurate brief account of Parny’s life and works and the contemporary reception of the text; background material on the reception of Milton in France; and a critical account of how Parny’s parody engages with what have often been perceived as literary and theological weaknesses, or problem areas, in Milton’s text, with due reference to critical discussion of Milton in English.

About the author

Ritchie Robertson is Professor of German at the University of Oxford, and Catriona Seth is Professor of Eighteenth-Century French Literature at the University of Nancy