Milton's Complex Words

Milton's Complex Words

Author: Paul Hammond

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 498

ISBN-13: 0198810113

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Every major poet or philosopher develops their own distinctive semantic field around those terms which matter most to them, or which contribute most profoundly to the imagined world of a particular work. This book explores the specific meanings which Milton develops around key words in Paradise Lost. Some of these are theological or philosophical terms (e.g. 'evil', 'grace', 'reason'); others are words which shape the imagined world of the poem (e.g. 'dark', 'fall', 'within'); yet others are small words or even prefixes which subtly move the argument in new directions (e.g. 'if', 'not', 're-'). Milton seems to expect his readers to be alert to the special semantic field which he creates around such words, often by infusing them with biblical and literary connotations, and activating their etymological roots; alert also to the patterns created by the repetitions of such words, and particularly to their diverse use (and often their blatant misuse) by different characters. To understand the migrations and malleability of key words is part of the education of Milton's reader.


Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost

Author: Michael Cavanagh

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0813232465

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"The author provides a book-by-book examination of Paradise Lost for the first-time reader, highlighting the important features of Milton's epic style"--


Taste

Taste

Author: Denise Gigante

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 0300133057

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

div What does eating have to do with aesthetic taste? While most accounts of aesthetic history avoid the gustatory aspects of taste, this book rewrites standard history to uncover the constitutive and dramatic tension between appetite and aesthetics at the heart of British literary tradition. From Milton through the Romantics, the metaphor of taste serves to mediate aesthetic judgment and consumerism, gusto and snobbery, gastronomes and gluttons, vampires and vegetarians, as well as the philosophy and physiology of food. The author advances a theory of taste based on Milton’s model of the human as consumer (and digester) of food, words, and other commodities—a consumer whose tasteful, subliminal self remains haunted by its own corporeality. Radically rereading Wordsworth’s feeding mind, Lamb’s gastronomical essays, Byron’s cannibals and other deviant diners, and Kantian nausea, Taste resituates Romanticism as a period that naturally saw the rise of the restaurant and the pleasures of the table as a cultural field for the practice of aesthetics. /DIV


The Essential Paradise Lost

The Essential Paradise Lost

Author: John Carey

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2017-02-28

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0571328563

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

After its publication in 1667, John Milton's Paradise Lost was celebrated throughout Europe as a supreme achievement of the human spirit. Now it is little read. To bring readers back to Milton's masterpiece, John Carey has shortened it to a third of its original length. In this fascinating reinterpretation, Carey reveals new insights about Milton's sources of inspiration, while exploring divided readings of the work's key characters. The Essential Paradise Lost presents the epic's greatest poetry, with linking passages that preserve its cosmic sweep - from the superhuman defiance of a ruined archangel to a pair of tragic lovers, bewildered to find themselves responsible for the fate of the whole human race.


Gluttony and Gratitude

Gluttony and Gratitude

Author: Emily E. Stelzer

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0271089830

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Despite the persistence and popularity of addressing the theme of eating in Paradise Lost, the tradition of Adam and Eve’s sin as one of gluttony—and the evidence for Milton’s adaptation of this tradition—has been either unnoticed or suppressed. Emily Stelzer provides the first book-length work on the philosophical significance of gluttony in this poem, arguing that a complex understanding of gluttony and of ideal, grateful, and gracious eating informs the content of Milton’s writing. Working with contextual material in the fields of physiology, philosophy, theology, and literature and building on recent scholarship on Milton’s experience of and knowledge about matter and the body, Stelzer draws connections between Milton’s work and both underexamined textual influences (including, for example, Gower’s Confessio Amantis) and well-recognized ones (such as Augustine’s City of God and Galen’s On the Natural Faculties).