Milton: Political Writings
Milton: Political Writings

Author: John Milton

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1991-02-21

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780521348669

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John Milton was not only the greatest English Renaissance poet but also devoted twenty years to prose writing in the advancement of religious, civil and political liberties. The height of his public career was as chief propagandist to the Commonwealth regime which came into being following the execution of King Charles I in 1649. The first of the two complete texts in this volume, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, was easily the most radical justification of the regicide at the time. In the second, A Defence of the People of England, Milton undertook to vindicate the Commonwealth's cause to Europe as a whole.This book, first published in 1991, was the first time that fully annotated versions were published together in one volume, and incorporated a new translation of the Defence. The introduction outlines the complexity of the ideological landscape which Milton had to negotiate, and in particular the points at which he departed radically from his sixteenth-century predecessors.

Paradise Lost in Plain and Simple English (A Modern Translation and the Original Version)
Paradise Lost in Plain and Simple English (A Modern Translation and the Original Version)

Author: BookCaps

Publisher: BookCaps Study Guides

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 1596

ISBN-13: 1621072126

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John Milton put a twist on the story of Adam and Eve--in the process he created what some have called one of the greatest literary works in the English Language. It has inspired music, art, film, and even video games. But it's hundreds of years old and reading it today sometimes is a little tough. BookCaps is here to help! BookCaps puts a fresh spin on Milton’s classic by using language modern readers won't struggle to make sense of. The original English text is also presented in the book, along with a comparable version of both text. We all need refreshers every now and then. Whether you are a student trying to cram for that big final, or someone just trying to understand a book more, BookCapsTM can help. We are a small, but growing company, and are adding titles every month.

Poet of Revolution
Poet of Revolution

Author: Nicholas McDowell

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-10-25

Total Pages: 512

ISBN-13: 0691241732

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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.

Milton's Political Ideas and Paradise Lost as a Political Allegory
Milton's Political Ideas and Paradise Lost as a Political Allegory

Author: Volkan Kiliç

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2018-04-18

Total Pages: 118

ISBN-13: 1527509893

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Although Milton wrote several poems and sonnets in his earlier career, he became known as a revolutionary and passionate political activist, beginning his political career with the pamphlets that he wrote on the current politics of his time, defending antimonarchical rule and republicanism, giving particular attention to the religious and civil liberties of the people and the necessity of a free commonwealth. However, following the restoration of monarchy, he had to stop writing political pamphlets because, as a republican and defender of regicide, Milton was in danger, and the new regime made it impossible for him to express his political thoughts safely. He embarked on a literary project which included his major poetical works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Considering his earlier reputation as an ardent republican, leading an active political life, it can be stated that Milton could not detach himself from the political controversies of his time. Hence, he wrote Paradise Lost as a political poem in which he reflected and inserted his political views in an allegorical manner. This book re-reads Milton’s Paradise Lost in the light of his political views as reflected in his earlier political pamphlets. It argues that, using literature as a medium of expression, Milton intentionally wrote Paradise Lost as a political poem, in which, by re-writing the Biblical story of the Creation, the fall of Satan and the fall of Adam and Eve, he created a political subtext which reflected the social and political panorama of England of his time.

Courting the Abyss
Courting the Abyss

Author: John Durham Peters

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-02-15

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0226662756

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Courting the Abyss updates the philosophy of free expression for a world that is very different from the one in which it originated. The notion that a free society should allow Klansmen, neo-Nazis, sundry extremists, and pornographers to spread their doctrines as freely as everyone else has come increasingly under fire. At the same time, in the wake of 9/11, the Right and the Left continue to wage war over the utility of an absolute vision of free speech in a time of increased national security. Courting the Abyss revisits the tangled history of free speech, finding resolutions to these debates hidden at the very roots of the liberal tradition. A mesmerizing account of the role of public communication in the Anglo-American world, Courting the Abyss shows that liberty's earliest advocates recognized its fraternal relationship with wickedness and evil. While we understand freedom of expression to mean "anything goes," John Durham Peters asks why its advocates so often celebrate a sojourn in hell and the overcoming of suffering. He directs us to such well-known sources as the prose and poetry of John Milton and the political and philosophical theory of John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., as well as lesser-known sources such as the theology of Paul of Tarsus. In various ways they all, he shows, envisioned an attitude of self-mastery or self-transcendence as a response to the inevitable dangers of free speech, a troubled legacy that continues to inform ruling norms about knowledge, ethical responsibility, and democracy today. A world of gigabytes, undiminished religious passion, and relentless scientific discovery calls for a fresh account of liberty that recognizes its risk and its splendor. Instead of celebrating noxious doctrine as proof of society's robustness, Courting the Abyss invites us to rethink public communication today by looking more deeply into the unfathomable mystery of liberty and evil.

Kant and Milton
Kant and Milton

Author: Sanford Budick

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2010-04

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780674050051

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Kant and Milton brings to bear new evidence and long-neglected materials to show the importance of Kant’s encounter with Milton’s poetry to the formation of Kant’s moral and aesthetic thought. Sanford Budick reveals the relation between a poetic vision and a philosophy that theorized what that poetry was doing. As Plato and Aristotle contemplate Homer, so Kant contemplates Milton. In all these cases philosophy and poetry allow us to better understand each other. Milton gave voice to the transformation of human understanding effected by the Protestant Revolt, making poetry of the idea that human reason is created self-sufficient. Kant turned that religiously inflected poetry into the richest modern philosophy. Milton’s bold self-reliance is Kant’s as well.Using lectures of Kant that have been published only in the past decade, Budick develops an account of Kant based on his lifelong absorption in the poetry of Milton, especially Paradise Lost. By bringing to bear the immense power of his reflections on aesthetic and moral form, Kant produced one of the most penetrating interpretations of Milton’s achievement that has ever been offered and, at the same time, reached new peaks in the development of aesthetics and moral reason.

Milton and the English Revolution
Milton and the English Revolution

Author: Christopher Hill

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-01-14

Total Pages: 516

ISBN-13: 1788736842

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In this remarkable book Christopher Hill used the learning gathered in a lifetime's study of seventeenth-century England to carry out a major reassessment of Milton as man, politician, poet, and religious thinker. The result is a Milton very different from most popular representations: instead of a gloomy, sexless "Puritan", we have a dashingly thinker, branded with the contemporary reputation of a libertine.