The New Milton Criticism

by Herman, Peter C.; Sauer, Elizabeth

• ISBN13: 9781107603950
• ISBN10: 1107603951
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-05-28
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

The New Milton Criticism seeks to emphasize ambivalence and discontinuity in Milton's work and interrogate the assumptions and certainties in previous Milton scholarship. Contributors to the volume move Milton's open-ended poetics to the centre of Milton studies by showing how analysing irresolvable questions – religious, philosophical and literary critical – transforms interpretation and enriches appreciation of his work. The New Milton Criticism encourages scholars to embrace uncertainties in his writings rather than attempt to explain them away. Twelve critics from a range of countries, approaches and methodologies explore these questions in these new readings of Paradise Lost and other works. Sure to become a focus of debate and controversy in the field, this volume is a truly original contribution to early modern studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction: paradigms lost, paradigms found: the new Milton criticism Peter

Theodicies

Milton's fetters, or, why Eden is better than heaven

'Whose fault, whose but his own?': Paradise Lost, contributory negligence, and the problem of cause Peter

The political theology of Milton's heaven

Meanwhile: (un)making time in Paradise Lost

The gnostic Milton: salvation and divine similitude in Paradise Regained

The discontents with the drama of regeneration

Critical Receptions

Against fescues and ferulas: personal affront and individual liberty in Milton's prose

Disruptive partners: Milton and seventeenth-century women writers

Eve and the ironic theodicy of the new Milton criticism

Denis Saurat, and the old new Milton criticism

The poverty of context: Cambridge School history and the new Milton criticism

Afterword

Index

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