The Probability of Paradise Lost

Abstract: For much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, probability had been a quality of the propositions, sentences, and arguments extracted from a larger work for the purpose of example and instruction. But in the late seventeenth century, the concept grew into a criterion for the judgment of works in their entirety. The scenes of argument in Paradise Lost (1667) turned humanist convention against itself, and in so doing, helped usher probability into "the principal rule" of literary criticism: that fiction—irreducible to any of its parts, autonomous from the demands of teaching—should represent typical or generic patterns of human action.