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Thorough study of the essential interdependence of the pastoral and epic genres. Proceeds historically from Virgil tracing the evolution of the heroic toward the increasing accommodation of the pastoral. Establishes principles for interpreting the works of major poets who set out to resolve the tensions between imagination and reality, contemplation and action, poetry and prophecy.

Steadman suggests that these poets, along with most other Renaissance poets, did not actually regard themselves as divinely inspired but, rather, resorted to a common fiction to create the appearance of having special insight into the truth.

This analysis of the literary art of recapturing the past as the artist perceives it examines such questions as how a fictional narrative differs from other ways of seeing a past time; to what extent literature is nontemporal and to what extent it is tied to the institutions and traditions of its era; and how given works conjure up a sense of time.

First published in 1991. These ten essays by the distinguished Milton scholar Edward Le Comte examines the various themes, context and structure of Milton’s poetry and prose, including particular focus on both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. This title will be of great interest to students of John Milton and English Literature.

Essays on many of the most important literary figures of the 16th and 17th centuries

In this survey one may discover Milton as he saw himself and come to recapture some of his originality. The selections from A Milton Encyclopedia in this volume were written by experts in each subject.

In the most sweeping claim yet made for Milton's puritanism, Georgia B. Christopher holds that the great poet assimilated classical literature through Reformation categories, not humanist ones. Examining Milton's major works against the beliefs of Luther and Calvin, she shows how his poetry reflects their view of Scripture, the extra-literary properties they accorded God's speech, and the responses they expected of readers. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Contributing to our understanding of Ovid, Milton, and more broadly the transmission and transformation of classical traditions, this book examines the ways in which Milton drew on Ovid's oeuvre, and argues that Ovid's revision of the past gave Renaissance writers a model for their own transformation of classical works.

"A serious reading of Milton's Epic--basic enough to help novice readers and original enough in places to interest seasoned readers." --Seventeenth-Century News

Milton's Paradise Lost is one of the great works of literature, of any time and in any language. Marked by Milton's characteristic erudition it is a work epic both in scale and, notoriously, in ambition. For nearly 350 years it has held generation upon generation of scholars, students and readers in rapt attention and its profound influence can be seen in almost every corner of Western culture. First published in 1968, with John Carey's Complete Shorter Poems, Alastair Fowler's Paradise Lost is widely acknowledged to be the most authoritative edition of this compelling work. An unprecedented amount of detailed annotation accompanies the full text of the first (1667) edition, providing a wealth of contextual information to enrich and enhance the reader's experience. Notes on composition and context are combined with a clear explication of the multitude allusions Milton called to the poem's aid. The notes also summarise and illuminate the vast body of critical attention the poem has attracted, synthesizing the ancient and the modern to provide a comprehensive account both of the poem's development and its reception. Meanwhile, Alastair Fowler's invigorating introduction surveys the...

Inside "Paradise Lost" opens up new readings and ways of reading Milton's epic poem by mapping out the intricacies of its narrative and symbolic designs and by revealing and exploring the deeply allusive texture of its verse. David Quint’s comprehensive study demonstrates how systematic patterns of allusion and keywords give structure and coherence both to individual books of Paradise Lost and to the overarching relationship among its books and episodes. Looking at poems within the poem, Quint provides new interpretations as he takes readers through the major subjects of Paradise Lost—its relationship to epic tradition and the Bible, its cosmology and politics, and its dramas of human choice. Quint shows how Milton radically revises the epic tradition and the Genesis story itself by arguing that it is better to create than destroy, by telling the reader to make love, not war, and by appearing to ratify Adam’s decision to fall and die with his wife. The Milton of this Paradise Lost is a Christian humanist who believes in the power and freedom of human moral agency. As this indispensable guide and reference takes us inside the poetry of Milton’s masterpiece, Paradise Lost...

Milton?s early commentators?Henry Todd, Thomas Newton, Joseph Addison, and others?not only knew their classics well, they took them seriously as models of literary excellence and repositories of values. In the twentieth century, however, the classics have become mere ?background.? As a consequence, William M. Porter argues, not only is the foundational dimension of Milton?s poetry now hardly visible, even to scholars, but the potential of Milton?s poetry to revitalize the reading of the classics has been diminished. In this insightful study, Porter attempts once again to read both the classics and Milton?s epic poem sensitively and intelligently. He exposes the recklessly speculative and tendentious character of much earlier work on Milton?s allusions, in which allusions were promiscuously posited and in which Paradise Lost was too often regarded naively as triumphing over the classics. Porter demonstrates that Milton?s allusions, in which allusions to the classics, while fewer than has been supposed, are rich with wit, irony, and thought that can be grasped only by a reader with a double perspective.

Written during the crucial first phase of English empire-building in the New World, Paradise Lost registers the radically divided attitudes toward the settlement of America that existed in seventeenth-century Protestant England. Evans looks at the relationship between Milton's epic and the pervasive colonial discourse of Milton's time. Evans bases his analysis on the literature of exploration and colonialism. The primary sources on which he draws range from sermons about the New World justifying colonization and exhorting virtue among colonists to promotional pamphlets designed to lure people and investment into the colonies. Evans's research allows him to create a richly textured picture of anxiety and optimism, guilt and moral certitude. The central question is whether Milton supported England's colonization or covertly attempted to subvert it. In contrast to those who attribute to Paradise Lost a specific political agenda for the American colonies, Evans maintains that Milton reflects the complexity and ambivalence of attitudes held by English society. Analyzing Paradise Lost against this background, Evans offers a new perspective on such fundamental issues as the narrator's...

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.

Fifteen short, accessible essays exploring the most important topics and themes in John Milton's masterpiece, Paradise Lost. The essays invite readers to begin their own independent exploration of the poem by equipping them with useful background knowledge, introducing them to key passages, and acquainting them with the current state of critical debates. Chapters are arranged to mirror the way the poem itself unfolds, offering exactly what readers need as they approach each movement of its grand design. Part I introduces the characters who frame the poem's story and set its plot and theological dynamics in motion. Part II deals with contextual issues raised by the early books, while Part III examines the epic's central and final episodes. The volume concludes with a meditation on the history of the poem's reception and a detailed guide to further reading, offering students and teachers of Milton fresh critical insights and resources for continuing scholarship.

Despite writing about himself extensively and repeatedly, John Milton, the archetypal Puritan author, resolutely avoids the obligatory Augustinian narrative of sinfulness, conviction of sin, reception of the Word, regeneration of the spirit, and sanctification. The doctrine of fall, grace, and regeneration, so well illustrated in Paradise Lost, has no discernible effect on Milton's overt self-representations. Exploring this anomaly in his new book, Stephen M. Fallon contends that Milton, despite his deep engagement with theology, is not a religious writer. Why, Fallon asks, does Milton write about himself so compulsively? Why does he substitute, for the otherwise universal theological script, a story of precocious and continued virtue, even, it seems, a narrative of sinlessness? What pressures does this decision to reject the standard narrative exert on his work? In Milton's Peculiar Grace, Fallon argues that Milton writes about himself to gain immortality, secure authority for his arguments, and exert control over his readers' interpretations. He traces the return of the repressed narrative of fallenness in the author's unacknowledged and displaced self-representations, which in...

The first in-depth study of Stanley Fish's nonliterary writings.

Introduces readers to the scope of Milton's work, the richness of its historical relations, and the range of current approaches to it.

The Columbia Anthology of British Poetry brings together the most remarkable verse written in the British Isles over the course of the past twelve centuries, offering the greatest diversity of poetic voices in any anthology of its kind. From Shakespeare's memorable sonnets to Keats's haunting odes to T.S. Eliot's mediations on the conditions of modern life, the collection contains many of the best-loved treasures of British poetry. Longer and much-celebrated poems that rarely find their way into anthologies-including Pope's "Rape of the Lock" and Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"-claim a place in this collection. Queen Elizabeth I, Anne Killigrew, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Felicia Hemans are among dozens of women writers renowned in their own day and now restored to their rightful prominence. Scottish, Welsh, and Irish poets often excluded from anthologies of British poetry are here as well, including such extraordinary voices as Lady Grisell Baillie, Robert Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Seamus Heaney. The finest contemporary poets are fully represented also, from Thom Gunn to Eavan Boland. The result is an amazingly rich and wide-ranging conversation among ...

This study offers an approach toward Renaissance literary production, demonstrating that antipoetic sentiment, previously dismissed as an unimportant aspect of Tudor-Stuart literary culture, constituted a significant shaping presence in Sidney, Spenser and Milton.

First published in 1987, this is a critical edition of the 1647 text by the Scottish author Alexander Ross which offered the Renaissance reader not only a wealth of factual information concerning the gods, goddesses, heroes and monsters of ancient myth and legend, but also served as a treasury of interpretation and commentary ingeniously explaining the facts in terms moral, theological, historical and scientific.

Contains literary biographies of the third generation of seventeenth-century nondramatic poets - born after the start of the Thirty Years' War in 1618 and before the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660.

The author examines Milton's poetry in the light of the poet's treatise on the subject of devotion in the often-overlooked second book of The Christian Doctrine. This study suggests that Milton's poems can be understood as both theodices and devotions.

This text is a guide to poems written during the Victorian and contemporary periods. There are explications covering Matthew Arnold to William Wordsworth, W.H. Auden to W.B. Yeats and many others. Sources include books, journals, articles, and anthologies.

After the Heavenly Tune offers an expansive answer to the basic question central to the history of poetry and poetics: what do poets mean when they write "I sing?" Berley's chapters on Shakespeare and Milton unfold the remarkable development of these two "speculative musical poetics" who are central to the history of English poetry. And in his last two chapters on romanticism and modernism, he draws an intriguing line from Wordsworth to Stevens, in which the aspiration to song becomes a dazzling means of exploring, scrutinizing, and redefining the burdens and achievements--poetic, philosophical, social, and personal--for individual poets in their times. After the Heavenly Tune offers not only groundbreaking studies of The Merchant of Venice and Milton's theory of prophecy, but also compelling new readings of classical and medieval literary theory, the burdens of romanticism, and the resolutions of modernism. This work will appeal to a broad audience: Renaissance, classical, and romantic literary scholars; philosophers; musicologists; theologians; and general readers interested in English poetry and Literary Studies.

Examines cases of Puritan radicalism in New England, discusses New England's evolution in terms of Milton's epic poem, and analyzes the Puritan influence

Vols. for 1969- include ACTFL annual bibliography of books and articles on pedagogy in foreign languages 1969-

"Of interest to both literary scholars and scholars of church history and homiletics, Milton and the Preaching Arts also surveys sermons and sermon manuals, Bible commentaries, and works of religious controversy on the issues of English church government and scriptural style."--BOOK JACKET.