John Milton
John Milton

Author: John T. Shawcross

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-09-15

Total Pages: 521

ISBN-13: 0813181623

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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.

Milton Studies
Milton Studies

Author: Laura L. Knoppers

Publisher: Milton Studies

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780820704418

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Published annually by Duquesne University Press as an important forum for Milton scholarship and criticism, Milton Studies focuses on various aspects of John Milton's life and writing, including biography; literary history; Milton's work in its literary, intellectual, political, or cultural contexts; Milton's influence on or relationship to other writers; and the history of critical response to his work. The eight essays in this volume offer a variety of fresh subjects and cutting-edge approaches to Milton's prose and poetry. Topics in this issue include Macbeth and the uncanny in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; murmuring, blindness, and the service of God in Sonnet 19; the androgyny of Milton's epic self-presentation; the politics of heavenly and infernal triumphs in Paradise Lost; the literary history of satanic envy; Milton's fully dramatic (and sometimes unreliable) narrator in Paradise Lost; the fetishism of Milton's body in the biographical and critical heritage; and John Collier's provocative screenplay adaptation of Paradise Lost. Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Milton Among the Philosophers
Milton Among the Philosophers

Author: Stephen M. Fallon

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780801473678

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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 on Film
Milton on Film

Author: Eric C. Brown

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-04-06

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 027109351X

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In January 2012, shooting was set to begin in Sydney, Australia, on the Hollywood-backed production of Milton’s Paradise Lost, with Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper cast as Satan. Yet just two weeks before the start of production, Legendary Pictures delayed the project, reportedly due to budgetary concerns, and soon the company had suspended the film indefinitely. Milton scholar Eric C. Brown, who was then serving as a script consultant for the studio, sees his experience with that project as part of a long and perplexing story of Milton on film. Indeed, as Brown details in this comprehensive study, Milton’s place in the popular imagination—and his extensive influence upon the cinema, in particular—has been both pervasive and persistent.

Melville & Milton
Melville & Milton

Author: Robin Sandra Grey

Publisher: Duquesne

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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Two decades ago, Herman Melville's marked and annotated copy of John Milton's poetry first came to light. This was the most substantial and tangible evidence of the deep connections between the two authors since Henry R. Pommer's speculative study on Milton and Melville was published a half century ago.Featuring a foreword by John Bryant, this study brings together both Melville and Milton scholars in the same text, and makes available the important artistic connections between these two great authors.Also shared for the first time in this study are Melville's copious annotations to Milton's works, including numerous erased annotations that have only been partially recovered, a significant number of marginal markings and underlinings, all of which together offer us a chance to see one great author's provocative and idiosyncratic response to another.In addition to these annotations, the essays presented here suggest that Milton and his poetry fascinated Melville, provoking him at times to artistic competition in depicting the sublime, providing at other times a measure of companionship as they both explored religious heresies and civil wars in their respective ages. Melville enjoys Milton's combativeness toward institutions, civil and religious, as well as Milton's exposure of the grimness of civil war. But Melville, at times, appears annoyed with Milton's attempts to uphold the absurdities of religious doctrine -- to lend credibility and artistic authority to an otherwise questionable theology. Milton's assurances of faith are beyond Melville's ken, and his theodicy, Paradise Lost, a glorious failure.For Milton scholars, this study demonstrates Milton's very vital artistic and theological "afterlife" in America. For Melville scholars, this book shows Melville in American culture and history; his influence on studies in textuality and performivity and in theology and literary genre.

A Milton Encyclopedia
A Milton Encyclopedia

Author: William Bridges Hunter

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 1978

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 9780838750537

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This nine volume set presents in easily accessible format the extensive information now available about John Milton. It has grown to be a study of English civilization of Milton's time and a history of literary and political matters since then.

Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost
Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost

Author: William Poole

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-10-09

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0674971078

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William Poole recounts Milton's life as England’s self-elected national poet and explains how the greatest poem of the English language came to be written. How did a blind man compose this staggeringly complex, intensely visual work? Poole explores how Milton’s life and preoccupations inform the poem itself—its structure, content, and meaning.

Milton the Dramatist
Milton the Dramatist

Author: Timothy J. Burbery

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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This book-length study of Milton as a dramatist fills a longstanding gap in Milton scholarship. Combining author-contextual criticism, historicized reader-response theory, and new historicism, Timothy Burbery begins by answering common objections to the claim that the poet is a dramatist, including the putatively static natures of Comus and Samson Agonistes, Milton's egoism, and his Puritanism. Further, Burbery asserts, recent biographical evidence of Milton's consumption of drama, such as his father's trusteeship of the Blackfriars Theater, suggests that the future poet viewed commercial plays and thus probably alludes to these experiences in his early poetry. Exposure to the public theater may also have influenced major episodes of his own dramas, including the debate between the Lady and Comus, and Dalila's stunning entrance in Samson. The study then examines Milton as a practitioner of drama by analyzing Arcades and the Ludlow masque. Having mastered the conventions of masque in the former work, Milton stretched himself in Comus by composing a work that was far more playlike than any court masque. It is possible that his success with these dramas encouraged Milton to regard himself as a budding dramatist in the 1630s, for late in that decade he began sketching out ideas for tragedies on biblical subjects including the Fall, Sodom, and Abraham and Isaac. This material, found in the Trinity Manuscript, shows him working through practical problems of staging and presentation, and sets the foundation for Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. While Samson was never intended for the stage, it nonetheless embeds numerous stage directions in its dialogue, including information about the characters' appearances, gestures, and blocking. Awareness of these cues sheds light on some of the current critical debates, including the terrorist reading of the tragedy and Dalila's role. Burbery surveys the surprisingly extensive stage history of Samson, a history that tends to confirm its theatrical viability. Milton the Dramatist emphasizes Milton's dramatic achievements and thus restores a more equitable balance to our appreciation of his total literary achievement.

A Concise Companion to Milton
A Concise Companion to Milton

Author: Angelica Duran

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1405122722

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With brevity, depth, and accessibility, this book helps readers to appreciate the works of John Milton, and to understand the great influence they have had on literature and other disciplines. Presents new and authoritative essays by internationally respected Milton scholars Explains how and why Milton’s works established their central place in the English literary canon Structured chronologically around Milton’s major works Also includes a select bibliography and a chronology detailing Milton’s life and works alongside relevant world events Ideal as a first critical work on Milton

Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt
Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt

Author: Reginald A. Wilburn

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2014-05-12

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 0820705977

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In this comparative and hybrid study, Reginald A. Wilburn offers the first scholarly work to theorize African American authors’ rebellious appropriations of Milton and his canon. Wilburn engages African Americans’ transatlantic negotiations with perhaps the preeminent freedom writer in the English tradition. Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt contends that early African American authors appropriated and remastered Milton by completing and complicating England’s epic poet of liberty with the intertextual originality of repetitive difference. Wilburn focuses on a diverse array of early African American authors, such as Phillis Wheatley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frederick Douglass, and Anna Julia Cooper. He examines the presence of Milton in their works as a reflection of early African Americans’ rhetorical affiliations with the poet’s satanic epic for messianic purposes of freedom and racial uplift. Wilburn explains that early African American authors were attracted to Milton because of his preeminent status in literary tradition, strong Christian convictions, and poetic mastery of the English language. This tripartite ministry makes Milton an especially indispensible intertext for authors whose writings and oratory were sometimes presumed beneath the dignity of criticism. Through close readings of canonical and obscure texts, Wilburn explores how various authors rebelled against such assessments of black intellect by altering Milton’s meanings, themes, and figures beyond orthodox interpretations and imbuing them with hermeneutic shades of interpretive and cultural difference. However they remastered Milton, these artists respected his oeuvre as a sacred yet secular talking book of revolt, freedom, and cultural liberation. Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt particularly draws upon recent satanic criticism in Milton studies, placing it in dialogue with methodologies germane to African American literary studies. By exposing the subversive workings of an intertextual Middle Passage in black literacy, Wilburn invites scholars from diverse areas of specialization to traverse within and beyond the cultural veils of racial interpretation and along the color line in literary studies.