Milton's Theological Process

Milton's Theological Process PDF Author: Jason A. Kerr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019887510X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
This volume proposes a method for reading Milton's De Doctrina Christiana as an artifact of his process of theological thinking rather than as a repository of his doctrinal views. Jason A. Kerr argues that reading in this way involves attention to the complex material state of the manuscript along with Milton's varying modes of engagement with scripture and various theological interlocutors, and reveals that Milton's approach to theology underwent significant change in the course of his work on the treatise. Initially, Milton set out to use Ramist logic to organize scripture in a way that drew out its intrinsic doctrinal structure. This method had two unintended consequences: it drove Milton to an antitrinitarian understanding of the Son of God, and it obliged him to reflect on his own authority as an interpreter and to develop an ecclesiology capable of sifting divine truth from human error. Consequently, Milton's Theological Process explores the complex interplay between Milton's preconceived theological ideas and his willingness to change his mind as it develops through the layers of revision in the manuscript. Kerr concludes by considering Paradise Lost as a vehicle for Milton's further reflection on the foundations of theology—and by showing how even the epic presents challenges to the fruits of these reflections. Reading Milton theologically means more than working to ascertain his doctrinal views; it means attending critically to his messy process of evaluating and rethinking the doctrinal views to which his prior study had led him.

Queer Milton

Queer Milton PDF Author: David L. Orvis
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319970496
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Queer Milton is the first book-length study dedicated to anti-heteronormative approaches to the poetry and prose of John Milton. Organized into sections on “Eroticism and Form” and “Temporality and Affect,” essays in this volume read Milton’s works through radical queer interpretive frameworks that have elsewhere animated and enriched Renaissance Studies. Leveraging insights from recent queer work and related fields, contributions demonstrate diverse possible futures for Queer Milton Studies. At the same time, Queer Milton bears witness to the capacity for queer to arbitrate debates that have shaped, and indeed continue to shape, developments in the field of Milton Studies.

Milton's Theological Process

Milton's Theological Process PDF Author: Jason A. Kerr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019887510X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume proposes a method for reading Milton's De Doctrina Christiana as an artifact of his process of theological thinking rather than as a repository of his doctrinal views. Jason A. Kerr argues that reading in this way involves attention to the complex material state of the manuscript along with Milton's varying modes of engagement with scripture and various theological interlocutors, and reveals that Milton's approach to theology underwent significant change in the course of his work on the treatise. Initially, Milton set out to use Ramist logic to organize scripture in a way that drew out its intrinsic doctrinal structure. This method had two unintended consequences: it drove Milton to an antitrinitarian understanding of the Son of God, and it obliged him to reflect on his own authority as an interpreter and to develop an ecclesiology capable of sifting divine truth from human error. Consequently, Milton's Theological Process explores the complex interplay between Milton's preconceived theological ideas and his willingness to change his mind as it develops through the layers of revision in the manuscript. Kerr concludes by considering Paradise Lost as a vehicle for Milton's further reflection on the foundations of theology—and by showing how even the epic presents challenges to the fruits of these reflections. Reading Milton theologically means more than working to ascertain his doctrinal views; it means attending critically to his messy process of evaluating and rethinking the doctrinal views to which his prior study had led him.

Milton's Loves

Milton's Loves PDF Author: Rosamund Paice
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000865843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
This book is about the multiple loves of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained: sanctioned loves and outlawed loves, sincere loves and false loves, Christian loves, classical loves, humanist loves, and love as emotion. In showing how these loves motivate the most significant actions of the Paradise epics, it reveals Milton to have made creative use of the tensions between philosophical ideals, social conventions, and the rather messier ways in which love emerges in practice. Love, so central to Milton’s view of Edenic joy and obedience to God, unsettles earthly and heavenly communities and is the origin of Miltonic transgression. Milton’s Loves sheds new light on some of the most prominent concerns of Milton scholarship, including why Milton’s God is so difficult for readers to connect to, Satan’s apparent heroism, Milton’s radical theology, and the nature of Milton’s muse. It is a book that will appeal to students and scholars of Milton and early modern studies more broadly and is structured in a way that will aid easy reference.

Milton's Modernities

Milton's Modernities PDF Author: Feisal G. Mohamed
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810135353
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 521

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Book Description
The phrase “early modern” challenges readers and scholars to explore ways in which that period expands and refines contemporary views of the modern. The original essays in Milton’s Modernities undertake such exploration in the context of the work of John Milton, a poet whose prodigious energies simultaneously point to the past and future. Bristling with insights on Milton’s major works, Milton’s Modernities offers fresh perspectives on the thinkers central to our theorizations of modernity: from Lucretius and Spinoza, Hegel and Kant, to Benjamin and Deleuze. At the volume's core is an embrace of the possibilities unleashed by current trends in philosophy, variously styled as the return to ethics, or metaphysics, or religion. These make all the more visible Milton’s dialogues with later modernity, dialogues that promise to generate much critical discussion in early modern studies and beyond. Such approaches necessarily challenge many prevailing assumptions that have guided recent Milton criticism—assumptions about context and periodization, for instance. In this way, Milton’s Modernities powerfully broadens the historical archive beyond the materiality of events and things, incorporating as well intellectual currents, hybrids, and insights.

Love against Substitution

Love against Substitution PDF Author: Eric B. Song
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503631419
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
Are we unique as individuals, or are we replaceable? Seventeenth-century English literature pursues these questions through depictions of marriage. The writings studied in this book elevate a love between two individuals who deem each other to be unique to the point of being irreplaceable, and this vocabulary allows writers to put affective pressure on the meaning of marriage as Pauline theology defines it. Stubbornly individual, love threatens to short-circuit marriage's function in directing intimate feelings toward a communal experience of Christ's love. The literary project of testing the meaning of marriage proved to be urgent work throughout the seventeenth century. Monarchy itself was put on trial in this century, and so was the usefulness of marriage in linking Christian belief with the legitimacy of hereditary succession. Starting at the end of the sixteenth century with Edmund Spenser, and then exploring works by William Shakespeare, William Davenant, John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aphra Behn, Eric Song offers a new account of how notions of unique personhood became embedded in a literary way of thinking and feeling about marriage.

Climate and the Making of Worlds

Climate and the Making of Worlds PDF Author: Tobias Menely
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022677628X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Introduction : stratigraphic criticism -- "Earth trembled" : Paradise lost, the little Ice Age, and the climate of allegory -- "The works of nature" : descriptive poetry and the history of the earth in Thomson's The seasons -- Mine, factory, and plantation : the industrial georgic and the crisis of description -- Uncertain atmospheres : romantic lyricism in the time of the Anthropocene.

Milton's Vision

Milton's Vision PDF Author: Theo Hobson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441186085
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
No other writer is so grudgingly admired as Milton. He wrote great poetry, goes the received wisdom, but his creed was narrow, chilling, and inhuman. His reputation is that of a stereotypical Puritan and authoritarian. Yet Theo Hobson maintains that no one opposed religious authoritarianism with such vehemence. Indeed, he argues that no one was so adamant that political freedom is built into the Christian gospel. Milton insisted that Protestantism was compatible with political liberty-that the two ideas are complementary. By treating all ecclesiastical authority with suspicion, he helped to establish the modern ideal of secularism. He was a Christian libertarian who wanted every form of church to wither away, so that the Gospel might be completely free of coercion. Milton's Vision is thus a vital contribution to the contemporary debate about the place of religion in public life. There has never been a study of Milton that highlights his relevance to the core issues of our day: how religion gives rise to and interacts with secular ideals.

Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature

Rogue Sexuality in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Ari Friedlander
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192677950
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The "rogue," a term that described criminals, prostitutes, vagrants, beggars, and the unemployed, dominated the pages of early modern popular crime literature. Rogue Sexuality resituates the rogue by focusing on how their menace—and their seductive appeal—emerged not only from their social marginality, but also from their supposedly excessive sexuality and prodigious sexual reproduction. Through discussions of both familiar and little-studied early modern works by William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Robert Greene, Thomas Harman, and the inventor of modern demography John Graunt, this volume posits the sexualized rogue as the avatar of a new category of "socio-sexual identity" and traces a surprising social transposition, in which socio-political elites are portrayed as appropriating the rogue's sexual vitality and performative charisma to navigate moments of crisis. By tracking the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a normative discursive register, this book challenges the distinctions that literary critics and historians tend to draw between orderly and disorderly sexuality. With its focus on reproduction, rogue sexuality also provides a new framework for what Michel Foucault called "biopolitics," the state's focus on exercising power over life. In legal, administrative, and scientific documents, this book shows that early modern writers grappled with popular pamphlets' rendering of the alleged threat of rogue reproduction. Rogue Sexuality thus offers a new approach to the political history of early modern England as a population—as a people whose aggregate sexual life and reproduction were a key part of its political imagination.

Women (Re)Writing Milton

Women (Re)Writing Milton PDF Author: Mandy Green
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000375811
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
This volume of essays reconfigures the reception history of Milton and his works by bringing to the fore women reading, writing, and rewriting Milton, bringing together in conversation a range of voices from diverse historical, cultural, religious, and social contexts across the globe and through the centuries. The book encompasses a rich range of different literary genres, artistic media, and academic disciplines and draws on the research of established Milton scholars and new Miltonists. Like the female authors and artists whom they explore, the contributors take up a variety of standpoints. As well as revisiting the work of established figures, the volume brings new female creative artists, new subjects, and new approaches to the study of Milton.

Love and its Critics

Love and its Critics PDF Author: Michael Bryson
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783743514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge. Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself – in short, the very things it resists. The book engages with some of the seminal literature of the Western canon, including the Bible, the poetry of Ovid, and works by English authors such as William Shakespeare and John Donne, and with criticism that stretches from the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary academic literature. Lively and enjoyable in its style, it attempts to restore a sense of pleasure to the reading of poetry, and to puncture critical insistence that literature must be outwitted. It will be of value to professional, graduate, and advanced undergraduate scholars of literature, and to the educated general reader interested in treatments of love in poetry throughout history.