How Milton Works


Book Description

Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin, first published in 1967, set a new standard for Milton criticism and established its author as one of the world's preeminent Milton scholars. The lifelong engagement begun in that work culminates in this book, the magnum opus of a formidable critic and the definitive statement on Milton for our time. How Milton works "from the inside out" is the foremost concern of Fish's book, which explores the radical effect of Milton's theological convictions on his poetry and prose. For Milton the value of a poem or of any other production derives from the inner worth of its author and not from any external measure of excellence or heroism. Milton's aesthetic, says Fish, is an "aesthetic of testimony": every action, whether verbal or physical, is or should be the action of holding fast to a single saving commitment against the allure of plot, narrative, representation, signs, drama--anything that might be construed as an illegitimate supplement to divine truth. Much of the energy of Milton's writing, according to Fish, comes from the effort to maintain his faith against these temptations, temptations which in any other aesthetic would be seen as the very essence of poetic value. Encountering the great poet on his own terms, engaging his equally distinguished admirers and detractors, this book moves a 300-year debate about the significance of Milton's verse to a new level.




The Cleaner


Book Description

The first in a high-octane thriller series that is perfect for fans of Jack Reacher and Jason Bourne.




Milton Among the Philosophers


Book Description

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.




The New England Milton


Book Description

The New England Milton concentrates on the poet's place in the writings of the Unitarians and the Transcendentalists, especially Emerson, Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker, and demonstrates that his reception by both groups was a function of their response as members of the New England elite to older and broader sociopolitical tensions in Yankee culture as it underwent the process of modernization. For Milton and his writings (particularly Paradise Lost) were themselves early manifestations of the continuing crisis of authority that later afflicted the dominant class and professions in Boston; and so, the Unitarian Milton, like the Milton of Emerson's lectures or Thoreau's Walden, quite naturally became the vehicle for literary attempts by these authors to resolve the ideological contradictions they had inherited from the Puritan past.




Milton's Legacy


Book Description

In The Reason of Church Government, a thirty-three-year-old John Milton writes of his hope that by labour and intent study... joyn'd with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die. Even the young Milton, committed as he was to achieving a place in the annals of poetic history, might have been surprised by the strenuous efforts in aftertimes to keep his legacy alive. The fifteen essays that comprise this collection focus, from varied perspectives, on Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and A Mask, poems that have attracted sustained critical attention. Several consider shorter poems, such as the Nativity Ode, The Passion, Upon the Circumcision, and Sonnet 14. Some pursue issues of sources, authorship, and audience, while still others probe extant biographical records or reflect on the author as biographical subject. Diverse though they are in subject matter, approaches, and emphases, all demonstrate how Milton scholarship in the twenty-first century continues to be committed to not willingly let ting] Milton's literary legacy die. Kristin A. Brothers University. Charles W. Durham is professor emeritus of English at Middle Tennessee State University, and is president of the Milton Society of America.




Milton's Theology of Freedom


Book Description

At the centre of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost (1667) is a radical commitment to divine and human freedom. This study situates Paradise Lost within the context of post-Reformation theological controversy, and pursues the theological portrayal of freedom as it unfolds throughout the poem. The study identifies and explores the ways in which Milton is both continuous and discontinuous with the major post-Reformation traditions in his depiction of predestination, creation, free will, sin, and conversion. Milton's deep commitment to freedom is shown to underlie his appropriation and creative transformation of a wide range of existing theological concepts.




Milton the Mighty


Book Description

When little spider Milton discovers he's been branded deadly on social media - and is targeted by pest-killers BugKILL - he fears for his life and the future of his species. He must clear his name, but is he mighty enough to achieve the impossible: convincing humankind?




Global Milton and Visual Art


Book Description

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.




The Man Who Never Was


Book Description

Can the man who never was catch the criminals who never get caught? John Milton is used to operating in the shadows, weaving his way through dangerous places behind a fake identity. Now, to avenge the death of a close friend, he must wear his mask of deception once more. Beau Baxter was brutally murdered by a drugs cartel but that doesn't stop Milton from blaming himself for his friend's death. With the help of a trusted team of undercover experts and Beau's son, Milton is determined to track down the killers. And he isn't just after the man who gave the order. He's heading right for the top. Milton plans to follow the trail of cocaine from the nightclubs of Amsterdam all the way to its source in Colombia. Disguised as an ambitious buyer, he's prepared to work his way up the cartel hierarchy one rung at a time. But the ladder can be slippery and, as Milton travels deeper into a world of violence, ruthlessness and greed, he finds himself in a jungle that could prove impossible to escape.




Milton Avery


Book Description

Milton Avery chronicles the work of an artist who, although he did not become a serious, full-time painter until after he moved to New York at the age of 40, managed to carve out a unique position for himself in the art world over the next thirty-five years. A friend and colleague of the Abstract Expressionists who nevertheless maintained his commitment to representation, Avery was enormously important to several succeeding generations of artists and produced some of the most resonant and beloved images in American art history. Avery's work reflects the concerns he shared with the pioneer French modernists including Matisse, Dufy, and Picasso: saturated colour in distinctly new combinations and an interest in retaining the two-dimensional character of the canvas. The combination allowed him to create a distinctly American brand of modernism. AUTHOR: Robert Hobbs is an art historian who has taught at Yale and Cornell Universities. He is also the author of monographs on Robert Smithson and Edward Hopper. Hilton Kramer is a former critic of The New York Observer and former chief art critic of The New York Times. SELLING POINTS: The highly anticipated reprint of the artist's monograph that is still is considered the most comprehensive presentation of Avery's work Included are many unfamiliar pieces, in oversize colour plates that range in date from the early 1920s to 1963 A detailed chronology of the artist's life is included and rounding out the volume are essays that explore Avery's career in detail, from the importance of Avery's wife Sally Michel, to the interaction--personal, artistic, and political--between him and his Abstract Expressionist colleagues 120 colour & 38 b/w illustrations