Milton's Century

Milton's Century PDF Author: Michael R. Collings
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
ISBN: 1479409944
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 610

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Book Description
No artist creates his works in a vacuum. Beyond the conscious influence of books read, artwork seen, minds probed (through conversation or exchange of letters), writers are in no small part products of everything that surrounds them--people, places, things, events. MILTON'S CENTURY is designed to place one particular genius--John Milton, arguably the finest poet the English nation (perhaps even Western civilization) has produced--in the context of his time. And what a remarkable time it was--a century of revolutions, of discoveries, of literary and artistic efflorescence, of religious turmoil and political turbulence, of plagues and fires and ultimate rebuilding...and of the first adumbrations of the Modern Age. MILTON'S CENTURY becomes vital and alive for twenty-first-century readers through the vast network of connections and interconnections that Professor Collings articulates. [Borgo Literary Guides, No. 15.]

Milton's Century

Milton's Century PDF Author: Michael R. Collings
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
ISBN: 1479409944
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 610

Get Book Here

Book Description
No artist creates his works in a vacuum. Beyond the conscious influence of books read, artwork seen, minds probed (through conversation or exchange of letters), writers are in no small part products of everything that surrounds them--people, places, things, events. MILTON'S CENTURY is designed to place one particular genius--John Milton, arguably the finest poet the English nation (perhaps even Western civilization) has produced--in the context of his time. And what a remarkable time it was--a century of revolutions, of discoveries, of literary and artistic efflorescence, of religious turmoil and political turbulence, of plagues and fires and ultimate rebuilding...and of the first adumbrations of the Modern Age. MILTON'S CENTURY becomes vital and alive for twenty-first-century readers through the vast network of connections and interconnections that Professor Collings articulates. [Borgo Literary Guides, No. 15.]

Milton Among the Philosophers

Milton Among the Philosophers PDF Author: Stephen M. Fallon
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801473678
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
While Johnson charged that Milton "unhappily perplexed his poetry with his philosophy," Stephen M. Fallon argues that the relationship between Milton's philosophy and the poetry of Paradise Lost is a happy one. The author examines Milton's thought in light of the competing philosophical systems that filled the vacuum left by the repudiation of Aristotle in the seventeenth century. In what has become the classic account of Milton's animist materialism, Fallon revises our understanding of Milton's philosophical sophistication. The book offers a new interpretation of the War in Heaven in Paradise Lost as a clash of metaphysical systems, with free will hanging in the balance.

Milton's Italy

Milton's Italy PDF Author: Catherine Martin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317208293
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
This book joins a growing trend toward transnational literary studies and revives a venerable tradition of Anglo-Italian scholarship centering on John Milton. Correcting misperceptions that have diminished the international dimensions of his life and work, it broadly surveys Milton’s Italianate studies, travels, poetics, politics, and religious convictions. While his debts to Machiavelli and other classical republicans are often noted, few contemporary critics have explored the Italian sources of his anti-papal, anti-episcopal, and anti-formalist religious outlook. Relying on Milton’s own testimony, this book explores its roots in Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and that great "Venetian enemy of the pope," Paolo Sarpi, thereby correcting a recent tendency to make native English contexts dominate his development. This tendency is partly due to a mistaken belief that Italy was in steep decline during and after Milton’s travels of 1638-1639, the period immediately before he produced his prose critiques of the English Church, its canon law, and its censorship. Yet these were also fundamentally "Italian" issues that he skillfully adapted to meet contemporary English needs, a practice enabled by his extraordinarily positive experience of the Italian language, cities, academies, and music, the latter of which ultimately influenced Milton’s "operatic" drama, Samson Agonistes. Besides republicanism and theology (radical doctrines of free grace and free will), equally strong influences treated here include Italian Neoplatonism, cosmology, and romance epic. By making these traditions his own, Milton became what John Steadman once described as an "Italianate Englishman" whose classical "literary tastes and critical orientation...were...to a considerable extent" molded by Italian critics (1976), a view that is fully credited and updated here.

Milton's Imperial Epic

Milton's Imperial Epic PDF Author: J. Martin Evans
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501724010
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Written during the crucial first phase of English empire-building in the New World, Paradise Lost registers the radically divided attitudes toward the settlement of America that existed in seventeenth-century Protestant England. Evans looks at the relationship between Milton's epic and the pervasive colonial discourse of Milton's time. Evans bases his analysis on the literature of exploration and colonialism. The primary sources on which he draws range from sermons about the New World justifying colonization and exhorting virtue among colonists to promotional pamphlets designed to lure people and investment into the colonies. Evans's research allows him to create a richly textured picture of anxiety and optimism, guilt and moral certitude. The central question is whether Milton supported England's colonization or covertly attempted to subvert it. In contrast to those who attribute to Paradise Lost a specific political agenda for the American colonies, Evans maintains that Milton reflects the complexity and ambivalence of attitudes held by English society. Analyzing Paradise Lost against this background, Evans offers a new perspective on such fundamental issues as the narrator's shifting stance in the poem, the unique character of Milton's prelapsarian paradise, and the moral and intellectual status of Adam and Eve before and after the fall. From Satan's arrival in Hell to the expulsion from the garden of Eden, Milton's version of the Genesis myth resonates with the complex thematics of Renaissance colonialism.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne PDF Author: Milton Meltzer
Publisher: Twenty-First Century Books
ISBN: 0761334599
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Learn about the life of the famous American author.

Global Milton and Visual Art

Global Milton and Visual Art PDF Author: Angelica Duran
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793617074
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
Global Milton and Visual Art showcases the aesthetic appropriation and reinterpretation of the works and legend of the early modern English poet and politician John Milton in diverse eras, regions, and media: book illustrations, cinema, digital reworkings, monuments, painting, sculpture, shieldry, and stained glass. It innovates an inclusive approach to Milton’s literary art, especially his masterpiece Paradise Lost, in global contemporary aesthetics via intertextual and interdisciplinary relations. The fifteen purposefully-brief chapters, 103 illustrations, and 64 supplemental web-images reflect the great richness of the topics and the diverse experiences and expertise of the contributors. Part I: Panoramas, provides overviews and key contexts; Part II: Cameos offers different perspectives of the varied afterlives of the most widely-circulating illustrations of Paradise Lost, those by Gustave Doré; Part III: Textual Close-ups focuses on a rich variety of book illustrations, from centuries-old elite engravings to a twenty-first century graphic novel; and Part IV: A Prospect beyond Books, explores visual media outside of books that manifest powerful connections, direct and indirect, with Milton’s works and legend.

Milton's Theological Process

Milton's Theological Process PDF Author: Jason A. Kerr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198875088
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.

John Milton

John Milton PDF Author: John T. Shawcross
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135035261
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
The Critical Heritage gathers together a large body of critical sources on major figures in literature. Each volume presents contemporary responses to a writer's work, enabling student and researcher to read the material themselves.

The Milton Encyclopedia

The Milton Encyclopedia PDF Author: Thomas N. Corns
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300094442
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
"A resource for the general reader, the student, and the scholar alike that provides easy access to a wealth of information to enhance the experience of reading the works of John Milton"--

The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

The Human Satan in Seventeenth-Century English Literature PDF Author: Dr Nancy Rosenfeld
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409475042
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Framed by an understanding that the very concept of what defines the human is often influenced by Renaissance and early modern texts, this book establishes the beginning of the literary development of the satanic form into a humanized form in the seventeenth century. This development is centered on characters and poetry of four seventeenth-century writers: the Satan character in John Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, the Tempter in John Bunyan's Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and Diabolus in Bunyan's The Holy War, the poetry of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, and Dorimant in George Etherege's Man of Mode. The initial understanding of this development is through a sequential reading of Milton and Bunyan which examines the Satan character as an archetype-in-the-making, building upon each to work so that the character metamorphoses from a groveling serpent and fallen archangel to a humanized form embodying the human impulses necessary to commit evil. Rosenfeld then argues that this development continues in Restoration literature, showing that both Rochester and Etherege build upon their literary predecessors to develop the satanic figure towards greater humanity. Ultimately she demonstrates that these writers, taken collectively, have imbued Satan with the characteristics that define the human. This book includes as an epilogue a discussion of Samson in Milton's Samson Agonistes as a later seventeenth-century avatar of the humanized satanic form, providing an example for understanding a stock literary character in the light of early modern texts.