Milton Criticism Research Articles

“Special Feature: The Achievements of John Dennis,” ed. Claude Willan. 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope

“Special Feature: The Achievements of John Dennis,” ed. Claude Willan. <i>1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, ed. Kevin L. Cope</i>

Raphael On Trial: Digestive Ontology and Milton's Absolution of God

This paper reconsiders monist materialism in Milton criticism by addressing three issues in Paradise Lost: Raphael's ethos, Raphael's logos, and Milton's utilization of both for his poetic theodicy. It pays particular attention to the dubious functions of the ethical and logical flaws in Raphael's ontological discourse. This discourse—which I describe as "digestive ontology"—revolves around the concepts of universal materiality and digestive sublimation. It is also what forms the evidential basis of monist materialism. I argue that Raphael's digestive ontology is crucial to Milton's creative objective, precisely because of its numerous dissonances. These dissonances are necessary for Milton's incorporation of God into a narrative and his concomitant absolution of God, as they prompt readers to find the fallible Raphael, not the infallible God, accountable for the Fall. Raphael is thus the crux of Milton's resolution of the metaphysical, epistemological, and theological crises that the problem of evil and the conflicts between narrative and theodicy inevitably present.

Milton’s Complex Words: Essays on the Conceptual Structure of “Paradise Lost.” Paul Hammond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+479.

<i>Milton’s Complex Words: Essays on the Conceptual Structure of “Paradise Lost.”</i> Paul Hammond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+479.

Milton Now: Alternative Approaches and Contexts. Edited by Catharine Gray and Erin Murphy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. ix+284.

<i>Milton Now: Alternative Approaches and Contexts</i>. Edited by Catharine Gray and Erin Murphy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. ix+284.

Inside “Paradise Lost”: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic

Inside “Paradise Lost”: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic

“Give the devil his due”: Freedom, Damnation, and Milton’s Paradise Lost in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: Season of Mists

In their collection Milton in Popular Culture (2006), Laura Lungers Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón Semenza have established the importance of Miltonic intertextuality in popular culture, while recognizing the importance of William Blake to the field. Blake’s definition of Milton as “a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) lies at the centre of a main concern of Milton criticism since the poem’s original publication. The debate between Satanists and anti-Satanists goes back even further than Blake and the Romantics, and this central ambivalence is representative of the “discontinuities” and “irresolvable complexities” which Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (2012) argue are the focus of interest of the New Milton Criticism. Following this strand of critical thought, this article proposes to show how the introduction of Miltonic intertext into Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman , in issues 21–28, serves to structure the series’ theme of change and death — which involve questions of freedom and teleology, free will and damnation — through a critical dialogue with, and creative rewriting of Miltonic theodicy in the epic poem. Gaiman draws upon the ambivalent theological dimensions of Paradise Lost not to present his own concept of good and evil but rather to discuss the freedom to change and the damnation inherent in the inability to change as part of the human condition.

Feisal G. Mohamed and Mary Nyquist Milton andQuestions of History: Essays by Canadians Past and PresentMilton and Questions of History: Essays by Canadians Past and Present. Edited by Feisal G. Mohamed and Mary Nyquist. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Pp. viii+426.

<i>Feisal G. Mohamed</i> and <i>Mary Nyquist</i> Milton andQuestions of History: Essays by Canadians Past and Present<i>Milton and Questions of History: Essays by Canadians Past and Present</i>. Edited by Feisal G. Mohamed and Mary Nyquist. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Pp. viii+426.

The New Milton Criticism ed. by Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer

Peter C. Herman and elizabeth sauer, eds. New Milton Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 253 + xii pages. $27.99.Reviewed by Lara DoddsThe New Milton Criticism, a collection of essays edited by Peter Herman and elizabeth sauer, opens with the assertion that this volume will interrogate various paradigms of certainty (1) that have dominated Milton studies. These essays (all but one are new) are the first explicit attempt to define a Milton criticism in theory and practice; the volume draws together the disparate strands of scholarship that, often in homage to the long-neglected work of william empson, have been among the most vibrant and challenging contri- butions to Milton studies for the last decade. Throughout the collection, Her- man's influential identification of the Miltonic serves as a touchstone for the new Milton criticism's primary method: the identification of uncertainty, alternatives, and disjunctions in monumental poetry.1 This book will be of interest to any Milton scholar for its identification of new critical and scholarly possibilities; however, a key theme in this book is the identification and recovery of lost critical traditions. This volume provides a prospectus for a Milton criticism but suggests that these new directions may be found through a more precise mapping of the field's histories.The New Milton Criticism is divided into two sections: Theodicies and Critical receptions. six essays in the first part contest Milton's relation- ship to normative Christianities (12) in the major poems. in one way or an- other, each of these essays challenges the contention, argued most forcefully in Dennis Danielson's Good God (1982), that Paradise Lost is an aesthetic success to the extent that its is successful or, in other words, to the extent that it solves the of evil, excuses God, and confirms the value of Christian faith. richard strier provides the most direct rejoinder to this influential argument in Milton's fetters, or why eden is better than Heaven, which is a revised version of an earlier essay.2 strier argues that the most problematic and contradictory (25) aspects of Paradise Lost stem from attempt to write theodicy, while the greatest success of the poem is in its representation of unfallen eden. Here Milton wrote without fetters and by doing so escaped the framework of choice, deliberation, and anxious duty (37) that is always present in Heaven.In one of the many examples of productive exchange between and among the essays in this volume, Thomas Festa's contribution, though found in the book 's second section, reads as a response to strier's redefinition of theodicy. Festa suggests that we transfer our attention from theodicy's traditional con- cern with to an alternative problem of good. He identifies an ironic theodicy centered on the character of eve and directed toward the exposure of the immorality of rationalizing the suffering of others, including Christ, as a way to secure consolation for evil (188). Festa's essay, like those in the volume's first half, contests the presumption, common in Milton studies, that choice and rationality are positive individual and social virtues. instead, these essays seek to identify the possibilities for a non-rationalistic or a non-orthodox reli- gious experience. John rogers's The Political Theology of argues that the absolutism of Heaven should not be understood as an anal- ogy-either positive or negative-for human political structure; rather, it pro- vides a poetic form for heretical view that God's acts are arbitrary rather than necessary. only this radical contingency allows God 's creatures unfettered freedom (79). Michael bryson's essay aligns the son of Paradise Regained with what he calls a Miltonic Gnosticism (103). Though Milton could not have had direct knowledge of Gnostic texts, his distinction between custom and knowledge represents an independent discovery of the Gnostic distinction between pistis and gnosis, which, in Paradise Regained, informs the son's attempt to leave an external concept of God for an internal concept of God, a God found without for a God found within (103). …

Peter C.Herman and ElizabethSauer, eds. The New Milton Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. xii + 253pp. ISBN 13: 9781107019225. $95.00 (cloth).

Milton QuarterlyVolume 47, Issue 3 p. 188-190 REVIEW Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer, eds. The New Milton Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. xii + 253pp. ISBN 13: 9781107019225. $95.00 (cloth). William Poole, William Poole New College, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author William Poole, William Poole New College, OxfordSearch for more papers by this author First published: 10 October 2013 https://doi.org/10.1111/milt.12051Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume47, Issue3October 2013Pages 188-190 RelatedInformation

The New Milton criticism

The New Milton criticism

Speaking for the Dead: C. S. Lewis Answers the New Milton Criticism; or, “Milton Ministries” Strikes Back

Milton QuarterlyVolume 45, Issue 2 p. 95-106 Speaking for the Dead: C. S. Lewis Answers the New Milton Criticism; or, “Milton Ministries” Strikes Back DAVID V. URBAN, DAVID V. URBAN Calvin CollegeSearch for more papers by this author DAVID V. URBAN, DAVID V. URBAN Calvin CollegeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 25 May 2011 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1094-348X.2011.00277.xCitations: 5Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume45, Issue2May 2011Pages 95-106 RelatedInformation

The Greening of Milton Criticism

AbstractEcocriticism is an offshoot of the environmental movements that developed during the second half of the twentieth century and takes as its field of study literary treatments of the relationship between human beings and the physical environment. When it became established as a recognizable critical school during the 1990s, it was dominated by analyses of British Romantic poetry and literature of the American wilderness. In the present decade, its scope has been deliberately extended to include work from the early modern period. As early as the 1980s, however, the poetry of John Milton had begun to attract attention from critics with an interest in ecological concerns. Paradise Lost in particular became a key text for those who sought to resist the charge that the exploitation of the natural world was licensed by a homocentric Christian tradition based on the Biblical command to ‘subdue’ the earth and ‘have dominion’ over the creatures. An alternative to this tradition has been found in Milton’s conception of the newly created earth as a living organism, his dramatization of Eve’s response to the further Biblical command to ‘dress’ and ‘keep’ the garden of Eden, and his recognition of the ecological consequences of ‘man’s first disobedience’. Recent books and articles have begun to locate ecological readings of the epic and other poems by Milton within the contexts of seventeenth‐century developments in land management and materialist philosophy, the origins of modern scientific natural history, and the beginnings of anxiety about such environmental issues as pollution, the treatment of animals, and deforestation.

Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism. Edited by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola . Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. Pp. xii+320.

<i>Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism</i>. Edited by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola . Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006. Pp. xii+320.

The Art of Reasoning Well: Ramist Logic at Work in Paradise Lost

This article discusses the influence that Milton's education at Christ's College, Cambridge, had upon his poetry in Paradise Lost. Historicist criticism of Milton's works has tended to focus on political and theological concerns, whilst other approaches, where logic has been considered, have done so according to its current meaning over an early-modern conception. This article aims to reorientate current views of the role of logic in early-modern thought by examining definitions of logic and rhetoric within early-modern manuals; specifically it focuses on Ramist manuals, as Milton's own Art of Logic was based on the precepts of the French logician and pedagogical reformer, Petrus Ramus. Expanding on this, the article explores bibliographic material, including handwritten marginalia and printed paratextual apparatus, to suggest how these texts were physically approached in this period. The article argues that the education individuals received in logic imbued within them a way of approaching and analysing any and every subject at hand including literature, defining both how literary texts were written in this period and also how they were read and understood by their audience. Having established how logic was conceived of in the early-modern period and how this functioned, the article concludes by putting these precepts to work in a practical way, using them as a means of analysing Milton's poetry in an historically appropriate way. In doing so, the article argues for a new methodological approach within Milton criticism, using early-modern logical method as a means of reaching historically sound stylistic appreciations of Milton's works.

New Directions in Recent Milton Criticism

AbstractThis article considers the state of Milton criticism in 2008. It suggests that Milton criticism is emerging from a period when historicist criticism that investigated the politics of Milton's work was dominant and is now characterised by variety and change. The article considers how some historicist political criticism continues. It goes on to show how there is a new foregrounding of literary issues such as form and aesthetics and also how some Milton criticism is displaying an increasing interest in how Milton matters to the present. The article suggests that such changes could constitute a reaction against the historicist legacy but also argues that they build upon the insights of the past few decades by re‐examining the interactions of literature and politics.

The Many Faces of Milton

The quartercentenary celebrations of Milton's birth, culminating in the Ninth International Milton Symposium which convened in London in July 2008, have seen many professional Miltonists stopping to reflect on the relevance of Milton to contemporary readers and societies. In fact, the real question that seemed to be on everybody's mind was the relevance and trajectory of Milton criticism itself. Like any field of literary study, Milton criticism is subject to fashions and trends which tend to swing from one extreme to another. A certain approach first creeps in from the margins, then takes over the middle ground, only to overstay its welcome, before being marginalised by a new fashionable approach which, more often than not, is a very old one making a disguised comeback. As a subject of literary study, however, Milton is quite unlike any other in that his authorial personae and the critical premium placed on his explicit and implied intentions continue to tyrannise over his texts to such an extent that his poetry and prose tend to confound theoretical impositions and critical trends. When, for example, earlier in the twentieth century the New Critics attempted to declare the death of the author and treat only the formal implications of Milton's poetry and style, Milton the author simply refused to die, just as when, later in the century, deconstructive critics discovered that their fierce Derridean battle cry, ‘there is nothing outside the text’, turned into a feeble sigh of resignation: ‘there is only Milton in the text’. Conversely, when the New Historicists and then so-called cultural materialist scholars attempted to replace the avatar-like image of Milton as an isolated poet of genius with a complex historical phenomenon rooted in cultural and political contexts, the timeless power of said phenomenon's artistic singularity continually resisted, and still resists, any attempt to grind the poems into fine historical dust. When Shakespeare scholars are taken to task for their Bardology, there is some merit in the argument that the link between any extant texts of a given Shakespearian play and its author's great mind is treacherous. But in Milton's case there can be no such distinctions, not because we can establish Milton's authorship of his works with less controversy, but because Milton himself and the very idea of his authorship are written everywhere into his poetry and prose. It is precisely because of this that what Harold Bloom called long ago now the ‘scandal of Milton's continued authority’1 has always been something of a blessing to Milton studies; it has ensured that the best critical examinations of Milton's works and his literary-intellectual legacy are those which rise above theoretical propositions and merely contextual implications to engage with Milton's art and mind on Milton's terms, or rather on the terms which Milton everywhere writes into his intensely dialectical, self-examining literature.

Milton, Satan, Galileo, and Gunpowder

THAT the repeated allusions to Galileo in Paradise Lost—1.288, 3.589–90, 5.261–3, 7.366, 7.577–81—suggest the symbolic or ideological significance of the revolutionary scientist to the (revolutionary) poet constitutes a critical commonplace in Milton criticism, although the actual meaning of the allusions remains a subject of intense debate. I propose to complicate the debate further by suggesting another allusion to Galileo which, surprisingly, has gone unnoticed in critical commentary on the poem. In our postmodern world one of the most familiar quotations regularly attributed to Galileo—on websites, in epigraphs, and as institutional mottos—is the assertion, ‘All truths are easy to understand, once they are discovered; the point is, to discover them.’ The source of the quotation, however, is rarely acknowledged in such contexts. The passage is, in fact, to be found in the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic & Copernican (1632), in the second part, ‘The Second Day’, where Salviato, Galileo's alter ego, has refuted a theory presented from Simplicio's reading concerning the velocity of a cannon ball falling from the moon's orbit to the centre of the earth. When Salviato has offered the ‘proper’ calculation (later scientific and mathematical developments reveal it to be incorrect as well), he concludes, ‘Now you see how easy it is to understand’, to which the receptive Sagredo responds, ‘So are all truths, once they are discovered; the point is in being able to discover them’.1 Milton's close familiarity with the Dialogue was asserted by Allan Gilbert in the 1920s—‘The beginning of the Eighth Book of Paradise Lost is an untechnical summary of this work’.2 Although this particular claim was subsequently contested by Grant McColley,3 both Catherine Gimelli Martin and John Gillies have recently argued in favour of Milton's close knowledge of Galileo's Dialogue (with Gillies, in fact, approvingly quoting Gilbert).4 It seems very likely Milton could have possessed the 1632 edition of this text in Italian. Leo Miller asks, ‘Was there some particular book which Milton would have wanted more than any other to bring back from Italy?’, and concludes from its five imprimaturs and a reference in Areopagitica that Milton probably did own a copy of the original Dialogo.5 In Italian the passage in question reads, ‘Or vedete come è facile da intendersi. … Tali sono tutte le cose vere, doppo che son trovate; ma il punto sta nel saperle trovare.’6 In spite of his desire to find a ‘fit audience … though few’(Paradise Lost 7.31), Milton nevertheless may have wished unilingual English readers to note the allusion and therefore deliberately echoed the Thomas Salusbury translation of 1661; the passage there reads: ‘Now you see how easy it is to be understood. … So are all truths, when once they are found out, but the difficulty lies in finding them’.7

Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism – Edited by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola

Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism – Edited by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola

Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism. Edited by MICHAEL LIEB and ALBERT C. LABRIOLA.

The hyperbolic title of this latest collection of essays on Milton, assembled in honour of controversial critic Stanley Fish, instantly suggests that this is no ordinary festschrift. Many Miltonists will no doubt be surprised, if not troubled, to discover that they have been labouring for the past 40 years under the auspices of the ‘age of Fish’, which is not defined by the lifelong work of any number of other equally distinguished and important Miltonists, but solely by Fish's apparently ubiquitous, avatar-like ‘ “presence” in all aspects of Milton studies’ (ix). Moreover, the editors of the volume—themselves two pillars of the American Miltonist establishment—argue in their preface that Fish's insuperable ability to stir up controversy with his typically seductive, highly rhetorical, and hermetically sealed arguments is something to be admired and celebrated. Reminding readers, for example, that Fish's How Milton Works (2001) ‘unleashed a storm of controversy’ (ix), they are quick to aver that this is the sort of controversy ‘any author would be proud to claim as his or her own’ (ix). Whether or not one might share in this dubious sentiment, the principal that no publicity is bad publicity also informs Lana Cable's obsequious introduction. Here, Fish's former student clumsily attempts to manufacture controversy worthy of her mentor by recalling how a colleague of hers who once accused Stanley Fish, to her face, of being the Devil. Cable rounds off her little anecdote with the following appalling witticism: ‘Whatever first induced my fierce new colleague to identify Fish with the Prince of Darkness, he may since have found an opportunity to check his hypothesis, having succumbed prematurely to a failed, outraged heart’ (2). This tasteless opening gambit quickly backfires, however, as it forces the genuinely harassed reader to recognise that any discussion of Fish's ‘presence’ in Milton criticism as one who champions the ‘academic pursuit of truth’ (11) is surely as absurd as calling him the Devil.

Samson’s “Rousing Motions”: What They Are, How They Work, and Why They Matter

AbstractBefore going to the Temple of Dagon with the Philistian Officer near the climax of Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Samson tells the uncomprehending Chorus to “Be of good courage.” For, he assures them, “I begin to feel / Some rousing motions in me which dispose / To something extraordinary my thoughts” (1381–3). Samson’s motivation for his decision to enter the temple, together with his catastrophic act of pulling down the temple upon the Philistian nobility, and “inevitably” upon himself, has become the flashpoint of voluminous debate about Samson Agonistes in recent Milton criticism. This essay aims to contribute to this critical conversation by exploring precisely what Milton and his readers would have understood by the “rousing motions” that Samson reports feeling at this pivotal moment. Seventeenth‐century readers would have recognized Samson’s “motions” as the part of the so‐called system of “faculty psychology” responsible for the feelings. Beyond scrutinizing Milton’s text, I examine contextual support from ancient and early modern sources toward understanding Samson’s “motions” and their workings. As well as reviewing the theory of emotions expounded by Aristotle in the Rhetoric and Nicomachean Ethics, I describe the modifications to that theory propounded by the Protestant reformer Philip Melanchthon, as well as the nuanced approach to dealing with affective volatility developed by the Cambridge theologian William Fenner. Milton and these Protestant writers share three essential convictions: they locate the emotions within a comprehensive model of the mental faculties; they assert the power of the human agent, typically through the will, to control – in Milton’s phrase, “to temper and reduce to just measure”– their potentially overwhelming power; and, most significant of all, they regard the emotions as the specific point of interaction between God, typically in the form of the Spirit, and the aspiring spirits of the human being. This last claim in particular addresses a question raised by several recent commentators on Samson Agonistes, namely, whether Samson’s impulse to act comes from himself or from God.