Fish is a controversial figure, widely imitated yet widely criticized.
There is less disagreement over the clarity and power of his writing, as he is probably the clearest writer at work in contemporary literary theory. The central thesis of Surprised by Sin is that these inconsistencies have a pattern, which is that the reader, like Adam, falls into error or sin and then is brought up short. The reader of Paradise Lost reenacts and experiences the fall and ultimate redemption of humanity as he or she reads. This reading of Milton's poem conflicted, of course, with a central principle of New Criticism , the affective fallacy, which argued that the meaning of a work of literature was not to be confused with its effect on a reader. And in the years after the publication of Surprised by Sin, Fish went on to argue that what had at first seemed a peculiarity of Milton's work was in fact characteristic of all literature.