The role of John Milton's Paradise Lost in delineating the epic through fantasy in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials

Abstract

In the field of literature, it is common to find literary works that interact among themselves creating a relation of intertextuality. Based on this, our research proposes to analyse the role of Paradise Lost by John Milton ([1667]1820) in the delineation of the epic intent of the trilogy His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman ([1995-2000]2007). To understand this role, we analyse how some characters in the trilogy re-enact the fall of man and how the image of Satan in the trilogy seems to respond to the same image in Paradise Lost. To achieve this, we analyse passages from the books also in views of the ideas in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” by T.S. Eliot (1982) and The Theory of the Novel by György Lukács (1983). As a possible result we expect to find that the intertextuality between His Dark Materials and Paradise Lost is not only a matter of inspiration and that HDM might be seen a contemporary epic for our generation.