Author: Michael Cavanagh
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
ISBN: 0813232465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 241
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Book Description
A record of a teacher’s lifelong love affair with the beauty, wit, and profundity of Paradise Lost, celebrating John Milton’s un-doctrinal, complex, and therefore deeply satisfying perception of the human condition. After surveying Milton’s recurrent struggle as a reconciler of conflicting ideals, this Primer undertakes a book-by-book reading of Paradise Lost, reviewing key features of Milton’s “various style,” and why we treasure that style. Cavanagh constantly revisits Milton the singer and maker, and the artistic problems he faced in writing this almost impossible poem. This book is emphatically for first-time readers of Milton, with little or no prior exposure, but with ambition to encounter challenging poetry. These are readers who tell you they “have always been meaning to read Paradise Lost,” who seek to enjoy the epic without being overwhelmed by its daunting learning and expansive frame of reference. Avoiding the narrowly specialized focus of most Milton scholarship, Cavanagh deals forthrightly with issues that recur across generations of readers, gathering selected voices—from scholars and poets alike—from 1674 through the present. Lively and jargon-free, this Primer makes Paradise Lost accessible and fresh, offering a credible beginning to what is a great intellectual and aesthetic adventure.
Author: John Reichert
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Milton's Wisdom examines the poet's use of the traditional notion that the eternal wisdom of God expressed itself in the "books" of nature and Scripture. It is the first study to draw attention to Milton's extensive use of biblical wisdom literature in his dramatization of Adam and Eve's education, their fall, and their reconciliation with one another and with God. The author looks at the ways theological and hence epistemological questions converge on and are generated by Adam's, Eve's, and Satan's responses to the world they see around them and to the words God and his emissaries speak to them. Reichert argues that the nature/Scripture dichotomy informs the symmetrical structure of the twelve books of Milton's epic. Milton's Wisdom challenges previous readings that have tried to ally Milton with the Puritans' strict theology of the word. Reichert has shifted our attention away from literary and historical theory and back to the experience of the poem as a whole.
Author: Stanley Eugene Fish
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674004658
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 640
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Book Description
Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin, first published in 1967, set a new standard for Milton criticism and established its author as one of the world's preeminent Milton scholars. The lifelong engagement begun in that work culminates in this book, the magnum opus of a formidable critic and the definitive statement on Milton for our time. How Milton works "from the inside out" is the foremost concern of Fish's book, which explores the radical effect of Milton's theological convictions on his poetry and prose. For Milton the value of a poem or of any other production derives from the inner worth of its author and not from any external measure of excellence or heroism. Milton's aesthetic, says Fish, is an "aesthetic of testimony": every action, whether verbal or physical, is or should be the action of holding fast to a single saving commitment against the allure of plot, narrative, representation, signs, drama--anything that might be construed as an illegitimate supplement to divine truth. Much of the energy of Milton's writing, according to Fish, comes from the effort to maintain his faith against these temptations, temptations which in any other aesthetic would be seen as the very essence of poetic value. Encountering the great poet on his own terms, engaging his equally distinguished admirers and detractors, this book moves a 300-year debate about the significance of Milton's verse to a new level.
Author: Nicholas McDowell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691241732
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 512
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Book Description
A groundbreaking biography of Milton’s formative years that provides a new account of the poet’s political radicalization John Milton (1608–1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Tracing Milton’s literary, intellectual, and political development with unprecedented depth and understanding, Poet of Revolution is an unmatched biographical account of the formation of the mind that would go on to create Paradise Lost—but would first justify the killing of a king. Biographers of Milton have always struggled to explain how the young poet became a notorious defender of regicide and other radical ideas such as freedom of the press, religious toleration, and republicanism. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography of Milton’s formative years, Nicholas McDowell draws on recent archival discoveries to reconcile at last the poet and polemicist. He charts Milton’s development from his earliest days as a London schoolboy, through his university life and travels in Italy, to his emergence as a public writer during the English Civil War. At the same time, McDowell presents fresh, richly contextual readings of Milton’s best-known works from this period, including the “Nativity Ode,” “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” Comus, and “Lycidas.” Challenging biographers who claim that Milton was always a secret radical, Poet of Revolution shows how the events that provoked civil war in England combined with Milton’s astonishing programme of self-education to instil the beliefs that would shape not only his political prose but also his later epic masterpiece.
Author: Isabel Rivers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134844174
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 243
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Book Description
Since publication in 1979 Isabel Rivers' sourcebook has established itself as the essential guide to English Renaissance poetry. It: provides an account of the main classical and Christian ideas, outlining their meaning, their origins and their transmission to the Renaissance; illustrates the ways in which Renaissance poetry drew on classical and Christian ideas; contains extracts from key classical and Christian texts and relates these to the extracts of the English poems which draw on them; includes suggestions for further reading, and an invaluable bibliographical appendix.
Author: John Milton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 68
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Book Description
Author: John Milton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 106
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Book Description
Author: John T. Shawcross
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813181623
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 521
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Book Description
The facts of John Milton's life are well documented, but what of the person Milton—the man whose poetic and prose works have been deeply influential and are still the subject of opposing readings? John Shawcross's "different" biography depicts the man against a psychological backdrop that brings into relief who he was—in his works and from his works. While the theories of Freud, Lacan, Kohut, and others underlie this pursuit of Milton's "self," Jung and some of his followers provide the basic understanding by which Shawcross places Milton in the panorama of history. His explorations of the psychological underpinnings of Milton's decision to become a poet, of the homoerotic dimensions of his personality, and of his relationships with father and mother demonstrate the extent to which psychobiography proves itself invaluable as a means to appreciate this complex writer and his complex writings. This biography combines the traditional chronological narrative with a technique akin to that of fiction, "a mixture of times and a triggering of remembrances from various time frames without time differentiations." Such an approach offers a view of Milton "not only in being but in process of being." Shawcross's examination of two current concerns, gender attitudes and political ideologies, ranges Milton's work against the self he exhibits. Specialists and nonspecialists alike will find in this magisterial biography a wealth of new insight into one of the greatest of English poets.
Author: David Quint
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691159742
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Inside "Paradise Lost" opens up new readings and ways of reading Milton's epic poem by mapping out the intricacies of its narrative and symbolic designs and by revealing and exploring the deeply allusive texture of its verse. David Quint’s comprehensive study demonstrates how systematic patterns of allusion and keywords give structure and coherence both to individual books of Paradise Lost and to the overarching relationship among its books and episodes. Looking at poems within the poem, Quint provides new interpretations as he takes readers through the major subjects of Paradise Lost—its relationship to epic tradition and the Bible, its cosmology and politics, and its dramas of human choice. Quint shows how Milton radically revises the epic tradition and the Genesis story itself by arguing that it is better to create than destroy, by telling the reader to make love, not war, and by appearing to ratify Adam’s decision to fall and die with his wife. The Milton of this Paradise Lost is a Christian humanist who believes in the power and freedom of human moral agency. As this indispensable guide and reference takes us inside the poetry of Milton’s masterpiece, Paradise Lost reveals itself in new formal configurations and unsuspected levels of meaning and design.
Author: John Milton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
