The Vision of Death in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych: A Comparative Study

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One of the persistently ubiquitous preoccupations of human beings is the concept of death and mortality; which has engaged us all with its awesome omnipresence one way or another. And the way one looks at it affects our whole life, not least our culture. Meanwhile, there are some who do not confine dying merely to the moment when one’s heart stops beating and one’s lungs cease inhaling and exhaling. John Milton and Leo Tolstoy are among those outstanding figures who have enjoyed such a transcendental outlook and have plucked its aesthetic fruits in their major work.. Considering their seminal positions in Western literature, the present paper intends to provid a close examination of how exactly these writers viewed this perennial concern, as depicted in their representative works. Reading closely Milton’s Paradise Lost and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, this article concludes that the two authors offer their own specific classification for death.

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Research in Contemporary World Literature
Volume 23, Issue 2
February 2019
Pages 371-392

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