Milton Now Alternative Approaches and Contexts

by Gray, Catharine; Murphy, Erin

• ISBN13: 9781137383099
• ISBN10: 1137383097
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-12-17
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Milton Now: Alternative Approaches and Contexts offers eleven new essays engaging topics, contexts and approaches rarely broached in the study of this author. Taking their inspiration from the twenty-fifth anniversary of the influential collection, Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, these essays deploy a wide array of methodologies, including historicist, neo-Marxist, psychoanalytic, formalist, feminist and queer. They explore an even wider range of topics, including secularism, time, poetics, mathematics, class, incarceration, women writers, libertinism, sexuality, slavery, race, and cross-dressing.

Author Biography

Catharine Gray is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. She is the author of Women Writers and Public Debate in Seventeenth-Century Britain, and has published articles on early modern women's writing and seventeenth-century war poetry. She is currently working on a monograph, Unmaking Britain: Poetry and War in the Seventeenth Century. 

Erin Murphy is Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Boston University, USA. She is the author of Familial Forms: Politics and Genealogy in Seventeenth-Century English Literature, Wartimes: Seveneteenth-Century English Women's Writing and its Afterlives, and several articles on Milton.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Erin Murphy and Catharine Gray
PART I: TEMPORALITY AND HISTORICISM
1. 'Shipwreck is everywhere': Lycidas and the Problems of the Secular; Sharon Achinstein
2. 'What dost thou in this world?'; Jonathan Goldberg
3. Milton's Capitalist Son of God? Temporality and Divine Order in De doctrina Christiana; Feisal G. Mohamed
PART II: FORM AND FIGURES
4. Sufficient and Free: The Poetry of Paradise Lost; Ann Baynes Coiro
5. As Jesus Tends To Divinity in Paradise Regained: Mathematical Limits and the Arian Son; Rachel Trubowitz
6. Uncouth Milton; Christopher Warley
PART III: TAKING LIBERTIES: RECONSIDERING MILTONIC FREEDOM
7. The Liberty of the Subject and the 'Pris'ner Samson'; Molly Murray
8. What Do Men Want? Satan the Rake, and Masculine Desire; Diane Purkiss
9. Shades of Representation: Lucy Hutchinson's Ghost and the Politics of the Representative; Katharine Gillespie
10. Equiano, Satanism, and Slavery; Mary Nyquist
11. When Milton was in Vogue: Cross-Dressing Miltonic Presence and William Craft's Slave Narrative; Reginald A. Wilburn