This is a descriptive catalog of one of the world's largest collections of Milton and Miltoniana. Housed at USC's Thomas Cooper Library, the Wickenheiser Collection contains more than six thousand volumes, including more than sixty 17th-century editions of Milton's writings and significant holdings of 17th-century Miltoniana.
A captivating biography that celebrates the audacious, inspiring life and works of John Milton, revealing how he speaks to our times. John Milton is unrivalled—for the music of his verse and the breadth of his learning. In this brisk, topical, and engaging biography, Stephen B. Dobranski brushes the scholarly dust from the portrait of the artist to reveal Milton's essential humanity and his unwavering commitment to ideals—freedom of religion and the right and responsibility of all persons to think for themselves—that are still relevant and necessary in our times. Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, is considered by many to be English poetry's masterpiece. Samuel Johnson, not one for effusive praise, claimed that from Milton's "books alone the Art of English Poetry might be learned." But Milton's renown rests on more than his artistic achievements. In a time of convulsive political turmoil, he justified the killing of a king, pioneered free speech, and publicly defended divorce. He was, in short, an iconoclast, an independent, even revolutionary, thinker. He was also an imperfect man—acrimonious, sometimes mean. Above all, he understood adversity. Afflicted by blindness, illness, and political imprisonment, Milton always sought to "bear up and steer right onward" through life's hardships. Dobranski looks beyond Milton's academic standing, beyond his reputation as a dour and devout purist, to reveal the ongoing power of his works and the dauntless courage that he both wrote about and exemplified.
Critics have traditionally found fault with the descriptions and images in John Milton's poetry and thought of him as an author who wrote for the ear more than the eye. In Milton's Visual Imagination, Stephen B. Dobranski proposes that, on the contrary, Milton enriches his biblical source text with acute and sometimes astonishing visual details. He contends that Milton's imagery - traditionally disparaged by critics - advances the epic's narrative while expressing the author's heterodox beliefs. In particular, Milton exploits the meaning of objects and gestures to overcome the inherent difficulty of his subject and to accommodate seventeenth-century readers. Bringing together Milton's material philosophy with an analysis of both his poetic tradition and cultural circumstances, this book is a major contribution to our understanding of early modern visual culture as well as of Milton's epic.
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.
Blanks, Print, Space, and Void in English Renaissance Literature is an inquiry into the empty spaces encountered not just on the pages of printed books in c.1500-1700, but in Renaissance culture more generally. The book argues that print culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries helped to foster the modern idea of the 'gap' (where words, texts, images, and ideas are constructed as missing, lost, withheld, fragmented, or perhaps never devised in the first place). It re-imagines how early modern people reacted not just to printed books and documents of many different kinds, but also how the very idea of emptiness or absence began to be fashioned in a way which still surrounds us. Jonathan Sawday leads the reader through the entire landscape of early modern print culture, discussing topics such as: space and silence; the exploration of the vacuum; the ways in which race and racial identity in early modern England were constructed by the language and technology of print; blackness and whiteness, together with lightness, darkness, and sightlessness; cartography and emptiness; the effect of typography on reading practices; the social spaces of the page; gendered surfaces; hierarchies of information; books of memory; pages constructed as waste or vacant; the genesis of blank forms and early modern bureaucracy; the political and devotional spaces of printed books; the impact of censorship; and the problem posed by texts which lack endings or conclusions. The book itself ends by dwelling on blank or empty pages as a sign of human mortality. Sawday pays close attention to the writings of many of the familiar figures in English Renaissance literary culture - Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, and Milton, for example - as well as introducing readers to a host of lesser-known figures. The book also discusses the work of numerous women writers from the period, including Aphra Behn, Ann Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Lady Jane Gray, Lucy Hutchinson, Æmelia Lanyer, Isabella Whitney, and Lady Mary Wroth.
"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"--
Acrostics in Milton’s poem have fascinated scholars, and I thought I might like to write another synopsized version of Paradise Lost in acrostic form that actually tells the story briefly. The idea was suggested by John Geraghty, a prominent collector of Milton books, art and ephemera. I am just beginning the project that I hope I can present it during National Poetry Month next year. I will also present two first edition illustrated books of William Blake, plus many other remarkable illustrated books. I do attempt things with Paradise Lost never done before. One was synopsizing it and then popularizing it in Heavy Metal Magazine. The synopsized book was on display in B. Dalton’s store window on 5th Avenue in mid- Manhattan and sold out. Another was the Gold Folio, and another was the Gold Scroll that reads like a Torah scroll (p.65). Then there was the Paradise Lost Costume ball in 2008 that got a major article in the New York Times. All were successful. We also have a major collection of Paradise Lost related materials, including first illustrated editions, an Elkington Shield that won a world fair award, etc. These will be on display when I produce the show related to the acrostic.
