Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal


Book Description

"Describes a rhetoric of radical excess that developed among the Puritan wing of English Protestantism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and from which Milton's radically agressive style of prose emerged"--Provided by publisher.




Milton and the Art of Rhetoric


Book Description

This book argues that Milton used innovative and cunning means to persuade readers in an age distrustful of traditional rhetoric.




Milton and the Rhetoric of Zeal


Book Description

"Describes a rhetoric of radical excess that developed among the Puritan wing of English Protestantism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and from which Milton's radically aggressive style of prose emerged"--Provided by publisher.




Antiformalist, Unrevolutionary, Illiberal Milton


Book Description

On the basis of a close reading of Milton's major published political prose works from 1644 through to the Restoration, William Walker presents the anti-formalist, unrevolutionary, illiberal Milton. Walker shows that Milton placed his faith not so much in particular forms of government as in statesmen he deemed to be virtuous. He reveals Milton's profound aversion to socio-political revolution and his deep commitments to what he took to be orthodox religion. He emphasises that Milton consistently presents himself as a champion not of heterodox religion, but of 'reformation'. He observes how Milton's belief that all men are not equal grounds his support for regimes that had little popular support and that did not provide the same civil liberties to all. And he observes how Milton's powerful commitment to a single religion explains his endorsement of various English regimes that persecuted on grounds of religion. This reading of Milton's political prose thus challenges the current consensus that Milton is an early modern exponent of republicanism, revolution, radicalism, and liberalism. It also provides a fresh account of how the great poet and prose polemicist is related to modern republics that think they have separated church and state.




Carnal Rhetoric


Book Description

In recent years, New Historicists have situated the iconoclasm of Milton’s poetry and prose within the context of political, cultural, and philosophical discourses that foreshadow early modernism. In Carnal Rhetoric, Lana Cable carries these investigations further by exploring the iconoclastic impulse in Milton’s works through detailed analyses of his use of metaphor. Building on a provocative iconoclastic theory of metaphor, she breaks new ground in the area of affective stylistics, not only as it pertains to the writings of Milton but also to all expressive language. Cable traces the development of Milton’s iconoclastic poetics from its roots in the antiprelatical tracts, through the divorce tracts and Areopagitica, to its fullest dramatic representation in Eikonoklastes and Samson Agonistes. Arguing that, like every creative act, metaphor is by nature a radical and self-transgressing agent of change, she explores the site where metaphoric language and imaginative desire merge. Examining the demands Milton places on metaphor, particularly his emphasis on language as a vehicle for mortal redemption, Cable demonstrates the ways in which metaphor acts for him as that creative and radical agent of change. In the process, she reveals Milton’s engagement, at the deepest levels of linguistic creativity, with the early modern commitment to an imaginative and historic remaking of the world. An insightful and synthetic book, Carnal Rhetoric will appeal to scholars of English literature, Milton, and the Renaissance, as well as to those with an interest in the theory of affective stylistics as it pertains to reader-response criticism, semantics, epistemology, and the philosophy and psychology of language.




Milton and the Resources of the Line


Book Description

This book will change how readers read not only Milton but any poetry. Whereas prose is written in sentences, poetry is written in lines, lines that may or may not coincide with the syntax of the sentence. Lines add an aural and visual mode of punctuation, with some degree of pause and weight at the line-turn. So lineation, the division of poetry into lines, opens a repertoire of possibilities to the poet. Notably, it encourages an enhanced concentration on meaning, rhythm, and sound. It makes metrical patterns possible, with interactions between regularity and deviation; or it makes possible the presence or absence of structural rhyme; or the multiple variations of the line-turn, whether in harmony with syntax or overflowing, in ways that may be either more or less conspicuous. Starting from theories of Derek Attridge, this book develops new methods for exploring the expressive resources of the verse line as exploited by the greatest of English poets, John Milton. Topics examined include: the interaction of strictness and freedom in the rhythms of Milton's line and paragraph; the interfusion of diverse prosodies in a single poem; approaches to free verse; rhyme in the earlier lyric verse and modes of near-rhyme in the later blank verse; the diverse modes of onomatopoeia; and the complex interweavings of prosody and ideology in this very political poet. The great themes and issues and characters of Milton's innovative and always controversial poetry are perceived afresh, being approached intimately through the rich possibilities of the line, and the insights of the approach illuminate the reading of any poetry.




A Milton Encyclopedia


Book Description

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.




Milton, Music and Literary Interpretation


Book Description

Milton, Music and Literary Interpretation: Reading through the Spirit constructs a musical methodology for interpreting literary text drawn out of John Milton’s poetry and prose. Analyzing the linkage between music and the Holy Spirit in Milton’s work, it focuses on harmony and its relationship to Milton’s theology and interpretative practices. Linking both the Spirit and poetic music to Milton’s understanding of teleology, it argues that Milton uses musical metaphor to capture the inexpressible characteristics of the divine. The book then applies these musical tools of reading to examine the non-trinitarian union between Father, Son, and Spirit in Paradise Lost, argues that Adam and Eve’s argument does not break their concord, and puts forward a reading of Samson Agonistes based upon pity and grace.




A New Companion to Milton


Book Description

A New Companion to Milton builds on the critically-acclaimed original, bringing alive the diverse and controversial world of contemporary Milton studies while reflecting the very latest advances in research in the field. Comprises 36 powerful readings of Milton's texts and the contexts in which they were created, each written by a leading scholar Retains 28 of the award-winning essays from the first edition, revised and updated to reflect the most recent research Contains a new section exploring Milton's global impact, in China, India, Japan, Korea, in Spanish speaking American and the Arab-speaking world Includes eight completely new full-length essays, each of which engages closely with Milton's poetic oeuvre, and a new chronology which sets Milton's life and work in the context of his age Explores literary production and cultural ideologies, issues of politics, gender and religion, individual Milton texts, and responses to Milton over time




The Oxford Handbook of Milton


Book Description

Four hundred years after his birth, John Milton remains one of the greatest and most controversial figures in English literature. The Oxford Handbook of Milton is a comprehensive guide to the state of Milton studies in the early twenty-first century, bringing together an international team of thirty-five leading scholars in one volume. The rise of critical interest in Milton's political and religious ideas is the most striking aspect of Milton studies in recent times, a consequence in great part of the increasingly fluid relations between literary and historical study. The Oxford Handbook both embodies the interest in Milton's political and religious contexts in the last generation and seeks to inaugurate a new phase in Milton studies through closer integration of the poetry and prose. There are eight essays on various aspects of Paradise Lost, ranging from its classical background and poetic form to its heretical theology and representation of God. There are sections devoted both to the shorter poems, including 'Lycidas' and Comus, and the final poems, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. There are also three sections on Milton's prose: the early controversial works on church government, divorce, and toleration, including Areopagitica; the regicide and republican prose of 1649-1660, the period during which he served as the chief propagandist for the English Commonwealth and Cromwell's Protectorate, and the various writings on education, history, and theology. The opening essays explore what we know about Milton's biography and what it might tell us; the final essays offer interpretations of aspects of Milton's massive influence on later writers, including the Romantic poets.




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