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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.]
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.
This book explores the way in which Milton's poems served as a rich and fruitful resource for the English poets of the eighteenth century. It refutes the old argument about Milton's allegedly 'bad influence' and challenges suggestions that great writers generally inhibit or oppress their successors. Regaining Paradise argues that what interested eighteenth-century poets was primarily Milton's garden myth and that the best writers typically found Milton, not a burden, but an inspiring resources available for their appropriation. Regaining Paradise cuts across some of the boundaries that traditionally divide English studies. It looks at Milton not in a Renaissance but an eighteenth-century context and it combines the perspectives of literary history and literary theory.
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.
No author in the English canon seems more deserving of the epithet sublime than John Milton. Yet Milton's sublimity has long been dismissed as an invention of eighteenth-century criticism. The poet himself, the story goes, could hardly have had any notion of the sublime, a concept that only took shape in the decades after his death with the advent of philosophical aesthetics. Such a narrative, however, fails to account for the fact that Milton is one of the first writers in English to refer to Longinus, the author traditionally associated with the Ancient Greek treatise On the Sublime. This book argues that Milton did have an idea of the sublime--one that came to him from Longinus but also from a larger classical tradition that offered a pre-aesthetic predecessor to the aesthetic concept of the sublime. Thomas Vozar shows that Longinus was better known in early modern England than has been previously appreciated; that various notions of sublimity beyond that of Longinus would have been available to Milton and his contemporaries; and that such notions of the sublime were integral to Milton's rhetorical, scientific, and theological imagination. Additional material relating to the early modern reception of Longinus is provided in the appendices, which contain the first bibliographical study of copies of Longinus in English private libraries to 1674 and an edition of a newly discovered seventeenth-century English translation of Longinus. Far from being anachronistic, Milton's "abstracted sublimities" touch on almost every aspect of his thought, from rhetoric to politics, from science to theology. Making substantive contributions to literary scholarship, classical reception studies, and the history of ideas, Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century returns the sublime to its proper place at the forefront of Milton criticism, re-evaluates the diffusion of Longinian texts and concepts in early modern Europe, and records a crucial missing chapter in the history of the sublime.
Designed for students new to Milton's work, this sourcebook outlines the seventeenth-century contexts of its composition and examines a range of the key critical responses from across literary history. The guide also usefully reprints frequently studied passages of the poem, suggests further reading, and provides cross-references between the textual, contextual and critical material.
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.
Wittreich demonstrates why Milton may prove to be the poet for the new millennium, in a book of interest to scholars and general readers. It engages the canonical Milton, as well as the Milton of popular culture, and uses the tools of theory- especially affective stylistics and reception history, to read Milton in his historical moment and our own.
First published in 1969. These nine lectures written by the distinguished scholar J. B. Leishman examines the various themes, context and structure of Milton’s poetry, with particular focus on L’Allegro, Il Penseroso and Lycidas. This title will be of great interest to students of John Milton and English Literature.
In this study of John Milton’s “L’Allegro”, “Il Penseroso”, and “Lycidas”, the perspective of an interpreting sign serves as the basis for analysis of the poems’ allusions to the Orpheus myth. The idea of an interpretant proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce and the semiotic relations theorized by Jorgen Dines Johansen work as a lens that enables the reader to see the extent to which Milton recreated the Orpheus myth and used its recreating powers in his poems. Since the three poems have different and opposing voices, the Orpheus myth is the trigger behind the change of voices, as well as the modeling frame that underlies the transitions from an innocent to an enlightened viewpoint. Furthermore, readers in general and critics of all persuasions will have the chance to appreciate the presence of the Orpheus myth in Milton’s work as the fragmented configuration of consciousness in the process of defining two orders of existence: the human and the divine.