Book Bearings
Forbidden Knowledge
- 369 pages · about 6 hours
- First published 1996
- 3 editions
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1 About this book
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, published in 1996, is a study by the literary scholar Roger Shattuck of an old question: are there things people should not know, or should not seek to know? He follows the idea through Western myth and literature, from Prometheus and the Garden of Eden in Milton's Paradise Lost, through Faust and Frankenstein, to Melville's Billy Budd, Camus, Madame de Lafayette and the poems of Emily Dickinson. The second half turns to modern cases, the atomic bomb and genetic engineering on one side and the writings of the Marquis de Sade on the other, and asks whether the pursuit of knowledge and experience should have limits.
- Morals
- Science and civilization
- Mystery
- Sex
- Knowledge, theory of
- Knowledge
- Theory of Knowledge
- Intellectual life
2 What to expect
A work of literary and cultural criticism asking whether some knowledge should be off limits. The first half reads myths and classic books, from Eden and Prometheus to Faust, Frankenstein and Billy Budd, as stories about curiosity and its price; the second turns to modern science and to the Marquis de Sade. It is scholarly in range but written for general readers, and it argues a moral position openly.
3 About Roger Shattuck
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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