From Forked Tongue to Forked Tongue
Rushdie and Milton in the Postcolonial Conversation
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9002900 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dirk Wiemann (0000-0001-8385-9686, University of Tübingen, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 47-63 |
| Publication date | 2007-05-23 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0021989407078586 |
| OpenAlex | W2069334284 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
In The Satanic Verses , Salman Rushdie draws heavily on Milton's Paradise Lost. However, unlike other postcolonial writers and theorists such as David Dabydeen and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rushdie does not primarily polemicize against Milton as an embodiment of Europe's alleged cultural supremacy. Instead, his scattered references and allusions to Paradise Lost — especially to the figures of Satan, Adam and Eve — encourage a rereading of Milton as an unexpected precursor of postcolonial subjectivities. While the article offers close readings of some particularly rich instances of rewritings of Paradise Lost in The Satanic Verses, it also discusses aspects of other Milton texts in order to delineate that writer's ambiguous position towards questions of Empire, the “civilizing mission” and the centrality of the modern European subject
Ancient history · Art · Art history · Conversation · Empire · Linguistics · Literature · Paradise · Paradise lost · Psychoanalysis · Subject (documents · The Imaginary · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · History · Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2008 - 2026 (19) |
| Highly cited | No |