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News from Hell

Satiritic Communications with the Nether World in English Writing of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Benjamin Boyce*
Affiliation:
University of Omaha

Extract

      A panoramic view of hell's in training,
      After the style of Virgil, and of Homer,
      So that my name of Epic's no misnomer.

The extraordinary voyage and the journey to the moon, types of voyages imaginaires popular in French and English literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, are now recognized literary types, and their interesting connections with the development of science and of poetry have been studied. Another kind of imaginary voyage merits attention, one that goes back not only to Lucian, the grand parent of most of these fantasies, but still farther to that remote time when man, having evolved the idea of a world of life after death, first thought with an archaic grin of the discomfort his enemies might feel when they were sent by Death to his realm of shades and skeletons.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1943

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