Abstract
This article considers, as its starting point, Roth's indebtedness in American Pastoral (1997) to John Milton's Paradise Lost. In particular, this article is concerned with representations of incest in both texts. Drawing on Milton's cosmology, Roth in American Pastoral situates father-daughter incest as the primary scene of destruction. Further, this essay considers the strange positing of incest in Zuckerman's fictional account of the Swede and the foundational status incest is accorded in the problem of undoing the pastoral. Narratively foundational, incest in this novel is for Roth, as it is for Milton, chronologically inseparable from the failures of the liberal state; that is, incest becomes a metonym for the paradise lost.
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