Forsyth Neil
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Forsyth Neil
Presentation
Hello!
I am Emeritus Professor (Professeur Honoraire) of English Literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. I no longer teach regularly, although I have been invited to give classes and lectures in neighbouring universities, and I was happy to participate in recent Continuing Education projects (Formation Continue) in Lausanne. You will see from my list of publications that I have been actively engaged in research for many years, and I still am. The picture at the top of the page is Gustave Doré’s image of Milton’s Satan looking thoughtfully into the abyss he is about to cross. It is a key passage in Paradise Lost, and discussed in one of my books, The Satanic Epic.
I grew up in Southampton, England, where I attended King Edward VI Grammar School from 1954-62 and studied Classics. In 1965 I was awarded a BA in English at King’s College, Cambridge. Among my teachers were Geoffrey Lloyd and Tony Tanner.
Travels
I then set off for the United States to continue my education. In 1967 I got an MA in Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a place I had chosen because I wanted to experience the Civil Rights movement up close. That summer I worked for Time-Life Books as a researcher on Ancient China, before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley. Among my teachers in Comparative Literature were Alain Renoir, Philip Damon, and Michael Nagler, and in English, Wayne Shumaker, John Coolidge and Stanley Fish. While in the Bay Area, I also taught at San Francisco State College. 1968 saw me involved in political activity on both sides of the bay: I was arrested, but never charged, in the San Francisco mass arrest of that year.
The universities closed down in 1970 to avoid the mayhem that followed the Kent State shootings, so I decided to try to work my way round the world. The Scandinavian shipping office gave me a berth as a deckhand on a Danish ship in Portland, Oregon, and soon I could sign off in Tokyo, Japan. During the seven months I lived in Japan I took various jobs from teaching English to modelling trousers. I hitch-hiked around the country. I also met and became friends with Angela Carter, and I have written a brief memoir of that time. I returned to Berkeley and San Francisco and I was eventually awarded a doctorate in 1976, with a thesis entitled ‘The Powers of Darkness Bound’.
Teaching
At San Francisco State College (as it still was), I taught in the departments of English, Humanities, Classics, Philosophy as well as World Literature. In 1977 I was awarded a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, where I taught Latin (Virgil) and Greek (Homer) as well as a Mythology course.
Switzerland
In 1980, I became Assistant Professor of English at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Then I moved along the lake in 1985 to become Professor of English at the University of Lausanne, where I was head of department at various times from 1990 until my retirement in 2010. I was then honoured by a Festschrift, After Satan, which includes contributions from good friends and colleagues over the years. I have also taught as invited professor or guest lecturer at most other Swiss universities, including Fribourg and Zürich. From 1994 to 1997 I was the editor of The European English Messenger, journal of the European Society for the Study of English.
Books
My first book (1987), The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth, is a history of the devil as a character in various narratives, beginning with the Humbaba of the Sumerian Gilgamesh tales. The last part, much updated from my PhD thesis, is about the early Christians, and ends with Augustine.
My second book, also published by Princeton University Press, is a study of Milton’s Paradise Lost, entitled The Satanic Epic (2003). It was awarded the James Holly Hanford prize of the Milton Society of America in 2004.
I was then commissioned by LionHudson, Oxford, to write a biography of Milton, which was published in the centenary year of 2008.
Articles and Essays
I have written many articles in journals such as Critical Inquiry, Comparative Literature, Modern Philology, The Milton Quarterly, Word and Image. I review occasionally for the Times Literary Supplement. See under ‘Publications’.
