Milton's Paradise Research Articles

Transmutations of Satan and Caesar: The Grotesque Mode in Milton's Paradise Lost and Lucan's Pharsalia

Milton QuarterlyVolume 49, Issue 2 p. 112-125 ARTICLE Transmutations of Satan and Caesar: The Grotesque Mode in Milton's Paradise Lost and Lucan's Pharsalia† Ivana Bičak, Ivana Bičak University of LeedsSearch for more papers by this author Ivana Bičak, Ivana Bičak University of LeedsSearch for more papers by this author First published: 21 May 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/milt.12127Citations: 1 †An earlier version of this paper was presented at the British Milton Seminar in Birmingham in October 2013. I am deeply thankful for the warm support and valuable feedback that I received there from Hugh Adlington, Cedric Brown, Gordon Campbell, Robert Cockcroft, Thomas Corns, John Creaser, Neville Davies, Neil Forsyth, Neil Keeble, Sarah Knight, and Joseph Wallace. Read 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 Volume49, Issue2May 2015Pages 112-125 RelatedInformation

“Dark with Excessive Light”: Milton's Paradise Lost and the Nineteenth-Century Astronomical Imagination

In Popular Astronomy (1878), Simon Newcomb remarks “he would be a bold astronomer who, in giving a description of the primeval nebulous mass, would attempt to improve on the great poet” John Milton...

Milton’s God: Democrat or Tyrant?

Politeness is a universal phenomenon that is present in every human interaction. Many theorists have attempted to theorize politeness the most important of whom are Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson. The application of their theory has been extended to include literary works which are conversational in nature like drama or works whose building blocks consist of dialogues. This study tries to apply Politeness Theory to Milton's Paradise Lost in order to solve the age-old dispute over Milton's God to whom contradictory characteristics of democracy and tyranny are ascribed. It will be shown that in the conversation that takes place between God and residents of Heaven, God is more careful about politeness strategies despite his supremacy and it seems to be at odds with tyrannical features attributed to him.

Rethinking Hawaa: Gender in Abdilatif Abdalla's <em>Utenzi wa Maisha ya Adamu na Hawaa</em> through the Lens of John Milton's <em>Paradise Lost</em>

This article analyzes the representation of Hawaa (Eve) in Kenyan poet Abdilatif Abdalla's epic poem Utenzi wa Maisha ya Adamu na Hawaa (Epic of the Life of Adam and Eve). Building on Alamin Mazrui's contention that the poem can be compared to John Milton's Paradise Lost, scholarly debate on Milton's treatment of Eve becomes a lens through which to more closely examine Abdalla's Hawaa and the larger gender implications of her role in the poem's narrative. Close reading of Abdalla's poem through this lens reveals a far less misogynistic interpretation of Hawaa than previous critics of the poem have recognized. Taking into consideration Abdalla's depiction of Hawaa's creation, her role in the couple's transgression against God, and her relationship with Adam before and after their expulsion from Paradise, this article argues that the poet offers Hawaa as an archetype not of female inferiority and treachery but of human fallibility and capacity for growth. The critic offers only a brief analysis of Abdalla's poem and no further mention of Milton to justify his comparison of the two works. The extreme temporal and cultural distance between these two poetic representations of the oft-told Judeo-Christian-Islamic origin story and the radical differences in breadth, style, and narrative progression undoubtedly raise questions about the validity of

“Shot Through with Orient Beams”: Restoring the Orient to Milton's Paradise

“Shot Through with Orient Beams”: Restoring the Orient to Milton's Paradise

Meditations on Mediation: John Milton and the Muslim Jesus

This paper explores theological and textual confluences between John Milton and Islamic theology. Rather than argue for the direct influence of Islamic sources on Milton, a series of historical and intellectual contexts are adduced which mediated contact between English and Islamic (especially Ottoman) cultures: the Mediterranean trade conducted by the Levant Company, the seventeenth-century acceleration and institutionalization of Arabic scholarship, and theological currents including anti-Trinitarianism and the discourse of monotheism. These contexts furnish a perspective from which to read Milton's Paradise Regained as part of a global tradition of literary elaborations upon the life of Jesus that also includes accounts of the sayings and stories of Jesus in Arabic sources, a corpus collectively termed “The Muslim Jesus” by Tarif Khalidi. While Milton's theology takes account of Jesus's Sonship and role as mediator, his poetics displace these dimensions in favour of human ones consonant with Islamic tradition.

State-Building in Harrington's Oceana and Milton's Paradise Lost, I-II

State-Building in Harrington's Oceana and Milton's Paradise Lost, I-II

‘By Wondrous Birth’: The Nativity of William Blake's ‘The Tyger’

This essay intends to demonstrate how Blake's pre-existing sketches in his ‘Notebook’ (henceforth [N]) influenced the composition of ‘The Tyger’. Blake drafted the poem amongst rough pencil drawings illustrating Milton's Paradise Lost (henceforth PL). The two sketches closest to the drafts of ‘The Tyger’ depict, respectively, Satan's encounter with the personifications of primeval Chaos and Night in PL II; and God's wrath at his foreknowledge, articulated in PL III, that Adam will disobey the single prohibition laid upon him. The Son of God immediately offers himself as a sacrifice to suffer the penalty due for Man's failing. Meanwhile, Satan struggles through the Abyss of Chaos, determined to make his way to the Earth to bring about Man's Fall.The tiger had been widely used as a symbol for the violence and bloodshed associated with the Revolution taking place in France when Blake was composing the poem. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell shows that Blake perceived in Milton's account of the Abyss of Chaos a parallel for the chaotic conditions prevailing in Paris. Blake illustrated part of the Miltonic passage in the sketch on [N108], and wrote the second draft of ‘The Tyger’ over it. Its influence is traceable in both drafts. The crucial fifth stanza of the completed poem, added to the second draft, was inspired ‘oppositionally’ by Milton's ode On the Morning of Christ's Nativity. Blake satirized the ode in Europe, probably work-in-progress concurrently with ‘The Tyger’. Blake may have been reminded of the ode by Milton's reference to the ‘wondrous birth’ of Christ in the context of the PL passage illustrated on [N110–111]. ‘The Tyger’ is thus a forerunner of W.B. Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’: the evocation of an apocalypse.

COLLEGE ENGLISH IN INDIA: THE FIRST TEXTBOOK

In her groundbreaking bookMasks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (1989), Guari Viswanathan established that “the discipline of English came into its own” not in England but in India, as an instrument of cultural colonization: “As early as the 1820s, when the classical curriculum reigned supreme in England despite the strenuous efforts of some concerned critics to loosen its hold, English as the study of culture and not simply the study of language had already found a secure place in the British Indian curriculum” (2, 3). Pausing to summarize the English literary curriculum fostered by “government schools in midcentury India,” she lists the following poetical works, gleaned from a report reprinted for the House of Lords in 1853: “Richardson's Poetical Selections (Goldsmith, Gray, Addison, Pope, and Shakespeare), Otway's Venice Preserved, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Othello, and Macbeth, Pope's Iliad by Homer, [and] Milton's Paradise Lost (the first four books)” (54). Although Viswanathan does not identify Richardson or his Poetical Selections, she is right to head the list with that textbook, which is mentioned in many other government reports of the period, and which was instrumental in establishing a classroom canon of British poetry in India before any such curriculum had been determined in Great Britain.

Fields of dreams Four Fields Tim Dee Jonathan Cape, 2013. 288 pp.

Fields of dreams <b>Four Fields</b> <i>Tim Dee</i> Jonathan Cape, 2013. 288 pp.

Reflections on religion, the divine, and the Constitution

Preface Part One 1. Euripides on the Use and Abuse of Revelation in the Service of the Political Order 2. The Divine, an Unsettling Duality, and the Conduct of One's Life: Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos Revisited 3. On Aristophanes' Clouds 4. Socrates' Dangerous Piety 5. Plato on the Divine in Human Affairs 6. Maimonides and Others on Faith, Philosophy, and Governing Principles 7. Conscience and Citizenship 8. El Greco and His Successors 9. Miguel de Cervantes on Death, the Divine, and the Proper Ordering of Human Affairs 10. Thomas Hobbes on Church and State 11. John Milton's Paradise Epics and the Divinely-Ordained Redemption of the Human Race 12. Challenges Posed by the Aztecs 13. The Holocaust and the Divine Ordering of Human Affairs ii. Part Two 1. Nature and the Divine in the Declaration of Independence 2. Benedict Arnold, Providence, and the Fates of Citizens and of Nations 3. Benjamin Franklin and the Workings of the Divine - At Least in America 4. the Year of [What] Lord? 5. Political Symbols and the Sacred in the United States 6. Thomas Jefferson and Religious Liberty 7. Abraham Lincoln and the Almighty 8. Presidential Invocations of the Divine 9. Presidential Farewell Addresses 10. Revelation, Human Understanding, and the Ordering of the Good Life: The Mormon Movement 11. Revelation and the Use of the United States Postal System: The I Am Movement 12. An Earth Elsewhere? 13. Yearnings for the Divine and the Natural Animation of Matter A. The Declaration of Independence (1776) Appendices A, B, and C should be taken from Reflections on Slavery and the B. The United States Constitution (1787) C. The Amendments to the United States Constitution (1791-1992) D. On the Destiny of the Jews in Eastern Europe (1939-1945) D (1) God, Please Choose Somebody Else (2000) D (2) In Eastern Europe, Anti-Semitism Is a Kind of Religion (2000) E. Martin E. Marty, George Anastaplo on the Christian Heritage (2010) F. George Anastaplo, On the Human Soul and Eternity (2010) G. Christopher A. Colmo, George Anastaplo's Appeal to Nature (2012) H. George Anastaplo, Reflections upon Any Trial for Impiety Not Only of Socrates But Also of Us (2013) I. George Anastaplo, Life and Death in Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (2013) J. Harry V. Jaffa, Foreword for George Anastaplo's Further Thoughts on Abraham Lincoln: Discourse on Chance and Public Life (2013) K. Roger H. Hildebrand, On the Use by Physicists of Life-like Words (2013) L. John Van Doren, Silence at Delphi (2013) M. Roster of Cases Drawn On About the Author

An Epistemological Analysis of] Predestination and Free-Will in John Milton's Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost by John Milton is one of the most important literary works of the seventeenth century. In this epic in verse Milton, by displaying a portrait that combines Greek Mythology and Christian teachings, seeks to elucidate Divine Providence and man’s relation with God’s decree. He puts together Divine will-power and human determination to make the meaning understood of the Man’s Fall. Milton first adhered to Calvin’s school with regard to determinism and free will but afterward he turned to Arminianism. In Calvinism, it is believed that man’s fall has been registered in God’s eternal knowledge, that is, the Fall was to happen according to the will of God from the beginning. Therefore, both the prosperity and salvation of humankind are dependent upon God’s decision. However, in the Arminius’ school, it is believed that man is free and has authority to either accept or reject the Divine favor. From Milton’s viewpoint, predestination is God’s foreknowledge about the occurrence of events not about the creation of events. Consequently, if we consider man’s will-power on the basis of this belief of Milton, man may also become possessed of Divine decision (Divine will-power).

Book Review: Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology

Early Modern Women on the Fall: An Anthology. Edited by Michelle M. Dowd and Thomas Festa. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2012. ISBN 978-0-86698-458-4. Pp. 386. $60.00 In this anthology, Michelle M. Dowd and Thomas Festa gather a varied selection of seventeenth-century women's writing inspired by the narrative of the Fall, particularly the character of Eve. As the editors note, Imagining Eve's voice in early modern England entailed direct engagement with the most issues of identity in political and social life (1-2). The authors of these texts engage such contentious issues, from education to breastfeeding to poetry to theology, as they explore the Fall as a basis for early modern theories about gender, society, and vocation. In publishing this anthology, Dowd and Festa hope to dispel the simplistic myth that religion functioned only to disempower women in the premodern era, or that the story of Eve's fall did not have a productive as well as a counterproductive force in English society (7). Including a wide range of writings inspired by the Fall narrative, the anthology illustrates the generative power of this tale to spark discussion, debate, and imaginative writing in the early modern period. Early Modern Women on the Fall includes relatively well-known voices, such as Aemelia Lanyer (selections from Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum), Katherine Philips (To Antenor, on a Paper of Mine), and Mary Astell Serious Proposal to the Ladies) alongside texts that have never before appeared in a modern edition, including Dorothy Calthorpe's Description of the Garden of Eden and selections from Mary Roper's The Sacred History. Among the other texts are poems by Margaret Cavendish (Poets Have Most Pleasure In This Life), Lucy Hutchinson (selections from Order and Disorder), and Jane Barker (A Farewell to Poetry, With a Long Digression on Anatomy), and prose works by Bathsua Makin (An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen) and Elizabeth Clinton (The Countess of Lincolns Nursery). Along with their chronologically-ordered selection of poetry and prose, Dowd and Festa include appendices containing the first three chapters of Genesis in both the Geneva and Authorized (King James) versions of the Bible, the marriage service from the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, biographical and textual notes, and a selected bibliography for further reading. Dowd and Festa address this anthology to both student readers and the general public. To that end, they ground their editorial practices in accessibility, describing their edited texts as standardized, Americanized, and lightly modernized (15). Their notes for each work are also geared toward accessibility and comprehension; for example, their first footnote to the selections from Dorothy Leigh's The Mother's Blessing places this work in its generic context as a mother's legacy, briefly explaining the genre and directing readers to further information on both genre and work (29nl). Dowd and Festa also use their notes to define unfamiliar terms and to gloss Biblical, literary, and historical mentions of such figures as Hannah (75n10), Nicostrata (151n95), or Brutus (276n57). In addition to providing this information, Dowd and Festa deliberately include as many complete texts as possible (such as those by Astell, Clinton, and Makin) rather than shorter selections, making these texts particularly useful for comprehensive discussion and inquiry (16). Through their editorial and selection practices as well as their careful notes, Dowd and Festa successfully create an anthology suitable for initial encounters with the rich world of seventeenth-century texts. A major strength of Early Modern Women on the Fall springs from another of its goals: inviting comparison of the selected works with each other and with others from the period. Dowd and Festa stress in their introduction that their purpose is emphatically not to re-segregate women's writing, expressing the hope that readers will place these texts in conversation with other works, perhaps beginning with the Fall as narrated in Milton's Paradise Lost (17). …

Wordsworth's "Prospectus": The Genre

In Preface to The Excursion, when Wordsworth describes 107-line extract from unfinished first book of The Recluse as kind of of design and scope of whole Poem (x), he invokes a genre which would have been familiar to contemporary readers. M. H. Abrams, who builds his masterwork Natural Supernaturalism around this text, describes it as a poetic (73), an indispensable guide not only to Wordsworth's poetry but also to Romanticism itself, so clearly does it articulate deepest literary and philosophical concerns of movement (20). This claim rests on high argument and imagery of Prospectus, Wordsworth's announcement of his plan to surpass Milton's Paradise Lost by writing a visionary poem about the Mind of Man, / My haunt, and main region of my Song (96-8), and by reformulating ancient Biblical prophecy of a new heaven and a new earth as an apocalypse of imagination, simple produce of common day (113). Wordsworth's term Prospectus also links his manifesto with mundane realities of book trade. A prospectus in literal sense was a printed advertisement for a projected book, book series, periodical, or other publishing venture, circulated prior to publication (and sometimes prior to writing) in order to attract readers and obtain advance sales. Prospectuses were a marketing device that played a part in subscription publishing, a method of publication used for most periodicals in this period and for certain types of book, particularly expensive, specialised books and multivolume books or book series such as collected editions, encyclopaedias, and anthologies (Feather 14). Typically a prospectus would describe proposed work, explain reasons for publishing it, how it improved on competition, and what terms and conditions of sale were, including where order could be placed, how much it would cost, when book was expected to be published, and how it would be delivered to purchaser. If an order were placed, prospectus became in effect a contract of sale and might even be used as a receipt, with author's signature and name of subscriber. The prospectus could also contain specimen pages, a table of contents, endorsements (sometimes called sanctions), and illustrations, anything that might entice a prospective buyer or subscriber. Often prospectus would be printed on same paper and in same format as work itself, so that prospectus would provide a physical sample of book, not just an abstract description of it. This aspect of transaction was important: a material object as well as an intellectual product was being offered for sale, and book purchasers were attentive to formats, typefaces, paper quality, and other physical features, all of which would be specified on prospectus under Conditions of Sale. A prospectus could range from a single page to four, eight, twelve, or even more pages, but a typical length was four pages, and a typical format was octavo. Prospectuses were free-standing pamphlets, distinct from other forms of advertising such as newspaper advertisements, publishers' catalogues, and end-page advertisements, all of which were used in this period (Raven 283). Prospectuses would be sent to booksellers, librarians, and individuals, and distributed at public places such as coffee houses. Some publishers and booksellers had national networks of agents who toured country distributing catalogues and prospectuses. Often, though, authors themselves distributed prospectuses and received orders, and authors frequently wrote prospectuses, as authors still sometimes write their own jacket blurb. (Powers 135) And they were used on a wide scale: print run of a prospectus might be many times that of work itself. The intended publisher of Coleridge's journal The Friend (which eventually acquired around 650 subscribers) advised that 10,000 copies of prospectus be circulated in advance, with another 2000 per month for each new issue (I. …

Milton's Theology of the Cross: Substitution and Satisfaction in Christ's Atonement

Recent scholarship on John Milton argues that Milton rejected the popular Reformation understanding of Christ's atonement, the penal-substitutionary theory of atonement, and that Milton was uncomfortable with the Crucifixion of Jesus as God's means of human salvation. A close reading of Milton's Paradise Lost and De Doctrina Christiana clearly shows, however, that Milton did in fact embrace the penal-substitutionary theory of atonement, and he believed that Jesus' death on the cross effected this atonement. Milton's decision not to dwell on the cross or the details of the crucifixion in his poetry does not manifest a rejection of the cross as God's means of effecting atonement.

John Milton and the Epochs of International Law

For the historian of law William Grewe in his controversial opus, The Epochs of International Law, it was the English writer John Milton who offered the death blow to an entire epoch, one founded on the principle that discovery brought legal title in Yet John Milton's Paradise Lost is rarely considered alongside the history of In this article, I contend that a robust history of law in the 17th century would profit from engaging head on with literary texts like Paradise Lost. Milton's understanding of the law of nations provides legal scholars with a richer intellectual history of 17th-century law than that typically on offer � one more sensitive to humanist methods, literary texts, and embodied questions of vulnerability. Approaching the intellectual history of the law of nations dialectically, I suggest that a full reckoning of Milton's law of nations in Paradise Lost requires a careful balance of presentism and openness to alterity � presentism in the sense that we might appreciate how strongly Milton's law of nations resonates with debates about law in our own time, and alterity in the sense that Milton's law of nations encompassed much that many of today's readers would hardly recognize as law. A full intellectual history of Milton's law of nations, then, may require us partly to estrange that term - to set aside a priori definitions of the international and resist easy transhistorical transpositions from Milton's late Renaissance world to our own - but it also requires a paradoxical domestication of the law of nations, a making familiar, a bringing into one's home.

Desiring Bodies: Ovidian Romance and the Cult of Form

Gregory Heyworth's Desiring Bodies considers the physical body and its relationship to poetic and corporate bodies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Beginning in the odd contest between body and form in the first sentence of Ovid's protean Metamorphoses, Heyworth identifies these concepts as structuring principles of civic and poetic unity and pursues their consequences as refracted through a series of romances, some typical of the genre, some problematically so. Bodies, in Ovidian romance, are the objects of human desire to possess, to recover, to form, or to violate. Part 1 examines this desire as both a literal and a socio political phenomenon through readings of Marie de France's Lais, Chretien de Troyes' Cliges and Perceval, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, texts variously expressing social, economic, and political culture in romance. In part 2, Heyworth is concerned with missing or absent bodies in Petrarch's Rime sparse, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and Milton's Paradise Lost and the generic rupture they cause in lyric, tragedy, and epic. Throughout, Heyworth draws on social theorists such as Kant, Weber, Simmel, and Elias to explore the connection between social and literary form. The first comparative, diachronic study of romance form in many years, Desiring Bodies is a persuasive and important cultural history that demonstrates Ovid's pervasive influence not only on the poetics but on the politics of the medieval and early modern Western tradition.

NOAM REISNER, John Milton's Paradise Lost: A Reading Guide. * PAUL HAMMOND AND BLAIR WORDEN (eds), John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation.

NOAM REISNER, John Milton's Paradise Lost: A Reading Guide. * PAUL HAMMOND AND BLAIR WORDEN (eds), John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation.

The Korean Adam: Yi Hyoseok and Walt Whitman

Yi Hyoseok (1907-1942) was one of the major Korean writers of his time, producing over two hundred works of poetry and prose. His popularity continues to this day: his works, which are included in almost every Korean best-twenty list of the last fifty years, are present in all authoritative anthologies and are taught as part of the governmentdesigned high school curriculum.1 Yi took his literary cues from the West more proactively than many of his contemporaries. He was especially influenced by the Miltonian trope of the loss of paradise and the Whitmanian version of redemption. It is in this context that I want to examine how these influences manifest themselves in Yi Hyoseok's literary consciousness, focusing in particular on how Walt Whitman's literary persona in Leaves of Grass appears in and shapes one of Yi's major pieces of short fiction.In 1910, Korea became a colony of the Japanese Empire, thereby losing its independence. However, at the same time, Korea, as a colonial subject, began to be flooded by the same forces of modernity that had been rapidly transforming Japan since the beginning of the Meiji Restoration (1868). One of these imports was the formation of a modern Korean literature following on the heels of similar developments in Japan. By the mid-to-late 1930s, when Yi Hyoseok was at his most prolific, Korean literature written according to Western literary conventions was only in its third decade.Yi's brand of literary modernism took on an eclectic flair that even to this day is difficult for critics to pin down. His use of a variety of themes, including a pronounced lyricism, a powerful-even graphic- sexuality, an urbane cosmopolitanism, and a unique, verse-like prose style seemed to baffle later critics in their attempts to categorize him as both a writer and a person. In an 1937 essay titled My School Days published in Yosung [Women] magazine, Yi talks about some of his literary influences. In addition to mentioning specific writers (including Shelly, Yeats, and Whitman), he gives two other pieces of information that provide insight into his literary world. First, Yi describes himself as being initially attracted to poetry, a strong influence on his burgeoning literary self-awareness. Second, Yi describes absorbing both romantic and realistic literature, going even further to suggest that these two things can and, in fact, must co-exist in art. For Yi:Literature grew out of a dialectic process between poetry and prose, and art was founded in the nexus where reality and dreams meet. Even when the apex of realism is reached, perhaps unknowingly the dream world is therein incorporated and this is not only essential to humanity but also may be the essence of art.2It is clear, then, that Yi took inspiration for some of his prose from poetry. The most obvious examples of such poetic influence are the many references one can find in his work to Milton's Paradise Lost. Yi had written his graduation thesis on John Milton and subsequently made extensive use of the Miltonic archetype of the loss of paradise and the quest for redemption in his two completed full-length novels, Hwabun [Pollen, 1938] and Byeokgong Muhan [Endless Blue Sky, 1940]. His use of the loss (and recovery) of paradise motif is subversive of Milton in both the Blakean sense (the earth-and not heaven-is figured as paradise) and the Whitmanian sense-the Adamic protagonist seeks to recover/create a new paradise he has never known, having committed no original sin and suffered no loss.3According to one source, Yi first came into contact with Whitman while in high school. Yi attended the best high school in Seoul, one that prepared students for entrance to the Imperial University. Here he immersed himself in a comprehensive poetry reader published in Japan, which included, in addition to Whitman, Heine and Goethe.4 Later, as a student of the English Literature Department of Gyeongseong Imperial University, he no doubt came into further contact with Whitman's work in the course of his studies. …

Paradise Lost Dressed in the Costume of History: John Martin’s Rendition of Paradise Lost

The story of the loss of paradise has been read and interpreted in different ages. Commentary on Milton's Paradise Lost is not limited to verbal texts; painters and illustrators have contributed greatly to the poem by presenting their own time-bound readings and interpretations of the poem through their illustrations that are far beyond mere decorations. John Martin, in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, deletes the Father and the Son from his illustrations. Only angels such as Raphael are the representations of deity and are as powerless and tiny as Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve, after the Fall seem as small, powerless and as subjugated to the natural surrounding as they were before the Fall. Satan is the only powerful figure in his elegant palace. Through a new historical outlook, the researchers aim at exposing the workings of ideology and dominant discourses that informed John Martin's pictorial reading of Milton's poem in the early 19th century