• Cambridge Scholars Publishing

    "[Genetically Modified Organisms: A Scientific-Political Dialogue on a Meaningless Meme is] presents the debate associated with introducing GMOs as a traditional debate between science and progress against dogma. After reading it, I hope that science will win for the sake of all of us."

    - Professor David Zilberman, University of California at Berkeley

Roaming, Wandering, Deviation and Error: Dialogues Between Paradise Lost and the Novels of Salman Rushdie

This book proposes a reading of John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost in relation to four novels by the contemporary novelist Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, Fury and The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In such a reading, terms such as influence and inheritance will, inevitably, come up. Rather than bypass them, the book refines such terms in order to meet some of the challenges posed by contemporary critical theory in the field of comparative studies. In this more nuanced comparative reading of these texts, which looks beyond a linear paradigm, Jacques Derrida’s term destinerrance is taken up as a means for thinking how the work of this “successor” (Rushdie) dialogues with Milton, conferring on the epic an elusive kind of afterlife.

Destinerrance will be taken here to signal an ongoing process of re-signification of texts that does away with the notions of adhesion or similarity to an original, central point. In the case of Milton and his “successor”, the fictional work of Salman Rushdie will be seen as constituting sites in which collaboration and contestation in relation to the epic are simultaneously and continually staged. Rushdie can, then, be seen to interweave Miltonic images of Eden, of the fall and a Satanic discourse of transgression to write territories and characters constituted in the crossings of domains of difference, territories in which colonial past and contemporary cultural formations and power structures are continually questioned and negotiated. In this way, his work enacts a re-signifying of Milton’s text, mediating, in these deviations, the way it reaches us today.


Mayra Helena Alves Olalquiaga has a Bachelor’s Degree in English Language and Literature from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. She also received a Master’s degree in English Literature from the same institution, with a thesis on narrative approaches to nationalism in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. In 2012, she was awarded a visiting researcher scholarship at the University of Toronto while carrying out her doctoral research on Derrida’s destinerrance, Rushdie’s novels and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. She has also conducted research on film adaptations of literary texts and post-colonial literature. This is her first published book.

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Buy This Book

ISBN: 1-4438-8725-0

ISBN13: 978-1-4438-8725-0

Release Date: 3rd March 2016

Pages: 170

Price: £41.99

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