Book Description

Evariste-Désiré de Parny, though largely forgotten now, was well known in the nineteenth century for his lyric poems, especially the Poésies Erotiques (1778-81), and the prose-poems in Chansons Madécasses (1787). He also wrote much humorous verse, including the anti-religious La Guerre des Dieux (1799) and Le Paradis perdu (1805). The latter is a parody of Milton's Paradise Lost in four relatively short cantos. It gives a central place to the War in Heaven, casting Satan as a revolutionary. It is highly entertaining in itself, and also an important example of parody as critical response to an original text.