Ingratitude and “Ingrates” and the Possibility of Reconciliation in <i>Paradise Lost</i> and G. B. Marino's <i>Adone</i>

The article attempts to systematize the ideas about the genre of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” in Russia in the 19th — early 20th centuries. An analysis of the work’s genre designations in books and periodicals is conducted, and categorizing features of the genre that corresponded to the perception of the epic in the period under consideration are noted. It is established that the genre nominations of “Paradise Lost” contained in Russian criticism, journalism and literary studies of the 19th — early 20th centuries, as well as in numerous translated works that appeared in Russian, can be perceived within the framework of three thematic areas. The first direction includes works in which the genre of “Paradise Lost” is designated as “epic poem,” “poem,” “epos,” or “epopee.” Comparisons of Milton’s work with both Homer’s epic and with variants of the genre from the Middle Ages and the New Age (Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” T. Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” F. G. Klopstock’s “Messiah”) are characteristic; the relevance of “Paradise Lost” to the author’s time, conditioned by the reflection of his religious and socio-political views, is noted. The genre-forming feature is the “high/majestic” category. The second direction is made up of publications that emphasize the sacred nature of the work, its biblical plot and images. The genre of “Paradise Lost” is designated here as a “divine poem,” “Christian poem,” “religious poem,” “poem on a biblical theme,” “great poem about paradise” or “religious epic,” which constitutes evidence of the perception of the work through its Christian imagery. The third direction includes studies whose authors single out the dramatic component as genre-forming. In such cases, the poem is called “a work in epic form,” “whose plan has a dramatic foundation, rather than an epic one” (K. P. Zelenetsky), or a lyrical drama (Alexey N. Veselovsky).

For the first time in both domestic and international literary studies, the motif of the lost paradise becomes the subject of an independent investigation within the context of G. K. Chesterton's works. In existing scholarly publications, this motif is mentioned only within the analysis of the garden imagery in the novel The Man Who Was Thursday, completed by E.V. Vasilyeva. Traditionally, researchers have focused not on the author's poetics but on the ideological aspects of his work. The motif of the lost paradise holds a significant place in Chesterton's oeuvre. The specific nature of its function in the English writer's works lies in the fact that the lost paradise is not irrevocably lost. Thus, the tragedy inherent in this motif within European literature is overcome by Chesterton, which emphasizes the uniqueness of his artistic world. The study employs the comparative method. It examines Chesterton's works pertaining to different genres and periods of the author's career. This article analyses the motif of the lost paradise in the works of G. K. Chesterton, one of the leading English writers of the twentieth century. The research encompasses a wide range of genres, including short stories, novels, treatises, and essays, and reveals the significance of this motif in the author's creative output. Particular attention is paid to the influence of Milton's poem Paradise Lost on Chesterton. The paper examines the specific features of the lost paradise motif's function in Chesterton's texts, as well as its interrelation with other motifs, such as miracle, freedom, love, the regained paradise, and idyllic and apocalyptic motifs. This research allows for a clarification of the specific features of Chesterton's poetics, particularly the motif structure of his novels and short stories, and serves to define the place of his work within the context of twentieth-century English literature.

An Interfaith Paradise Lost? Religion and the Memory of the Lebanese Civil War in Postwar Novels

“Won from the Void and Formless Infinite”: The Mathematical Equation 0×∞=1 in Paradise Lost

ABSTRACT This article cross-reads allusion, adaptation, and remediation in Paradise Lost and Allan Cubitt’s crime television-series The Fall (2013–16), exploring relations of feminine subjectivity and mediation in both texts. Mediated representations of women and women’s uses of mediated representation are central themes in both The Fall and Milton’s epic. Hypermediations that densely interleave different media forms draw attention to their operations, making them available for critique and perhaps for emendation. The Fall presents a series of hypermediated images that crystallize questions about the ways that adaptations can reproduce, question, or counter ideology encoded in their source texts.

ABSTRACT This article argues that both Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein (1818, 1831) and Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show draw on Miltonic companionship to address broad philosophical issues and to undergird their critiques of, respectively, the overreaching male Romantic ego and mindless consumerism prompted by mass media. In Paradise Lost, disruptions of the looks of sympathy and love that characterize Edenic companionship are linked with the fall into knowledge. Neglecting his own family, Shelley’s solipsistic Frankenstein makes a physically abhorrent Creature; when Frankenstein, in turn, denies the lonely Creature companionship, he dooms his family, the Creature, and himself. In The Truman Show, the quest for Miltonic companionship leads directly to a fall into knowledge. Drawing on both Milton and Shelley, Weir shows how Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of a reality television series, comes to discover the truth and flee a false Eden through his search for his true Eve, Sylvia. While both Frankenstein and The Truman Show might seem to challenge Milton, the stress on companionship ultimately affirms core Miltonic values.

ABSTRACT This article explores the formal similarities between epic similes and musical numbers within a musical film, specifically Menahem Golan’s 1980 movie The Apple, a parable about the corruption of artistic ideals by a Satanic and fascistic record executive. Both of these self-consciously artificial and metaleptic features challenge narrative immersion as the primary aesthetic experience. The simile and the song interrupt the story, but also serve as defining formal elements of the art object. Yet even within such formal unity, musical number and epic comparison rely upon a metaleptic skein of levels that distinguishes story from world, that reminds readers, redundantly, that they are reading and viewing an artificial object. In the end, Paradise Lost and The Apple reveal how much “gratuitousness,” “digression,” and “irrelevance” are the nature of both the art work and the real itself and, in so doing, challenge the presumed centrality of story-telling to human social orders.

This research shows how literature perpetuated dominant power structures and established cultural definitions of identity and otherness across historical contexts. The paper applied Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism to study Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) in the context of epic literature displaying new hierarchies of power, civilization, and knowledge parallel to later colonial discourse. To achieve this purpose, this work reinterprets Adam and Eve as the innocent, subservient, and somewhat naïve eastern "Other" as well as, Satan as the rational, ambitious, and dominating western "Self." It shows that Milton's construction of inferiority and superiority take-off the ideological structures critiqued by Said. The analysis refocused on such issues as they prevail against margin dynamic, the binary opposition of civilization against barbarism, and various Western misconceptions of the East, including the depictions of matrimony and gender roles. Such ideologies found in Paradise Lost resonate with Orientalism as justifications for colonial rule, even though this epic was written before Western expansion into the colonies.

ABSTRACT What did John Milton think of Oliver Cromwell? This has long been one of the most debated questions in seventeenth-century studies. Milton worked for the Cromwellian Protectorate throughout its existence, and in 1654 Milton presented Cromwell as the magnanimous or great-souled man, a figure who is the paragon of virtue in Aristotelian philosophy. Yet readers have persistently seen in the character of Satan in Paradise Lost a poetic manifestation of Milton’s disillusionment with Cromwell for having betrayed the values of the republic. This article contends that Milton’s treatment of magnanimity in Paradise Lost and other works, including Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, sheds new light on how he represents the creation of human beings, the process and effects of the Fall, and the relationship between virtue and grace – as well as how he reflected on the rule of the person that he had once hailed as England’s magnanimous man.

Abstract This article explores the paradise myth in A. S. Byatt’s ‘Morpho Eugenia’. While William Adamson’s journey from Bredely Hall to the Amazon parallels Satan’s ascent from Hell to Paradise in Paradise Lost, Seth’s adventure echoes Odysseus’s trip to the kingdom of the dead in The Odyssey, Aeneas’s descent into the Underworld in The Aeneid and Guyon’s journey to Hades’ dark realm in The Faerie Queene. Byatt integrates Miltonic motifs with Homeric, Virgilian, and Spenserian patterns, embedding the body–mind conflict within the paradise myth’s framework. The interplay between the lower and upper levels and Hell and Paradise underscore Byatt’s central theme: while marriage ensnares her artists and scientists, work liberates them.

Surviving and Sustaining: The perceived importance of sustainable diet practices among immigrant mothers.

This study provides an analysis, text, and translation of satire III.1 from Thomas Naogeorgus’s Satyrarum libri quinque priores (1555), which offers a vivid neo-Latin poetic depiction of the fall of Satan and his followers. It situates Naogeorgus’s work within the tradition of early modern satire and epic, exploring its alignment with theological discourse and its engagement with classical and Biblical motifs. Through a close reading of the text, this article identifies significant thematic and stylistic parallels with John Milton’s Paradise Lost. While acknowledging the limitations of asserting direct literary influence, it highlights Naogeorgus’s unique contributions to the broader literary tradition of Christian epic poetry. The paper calls for greater scholarly attention to Naogeorgus’s oeuvre, emphasizing its value beyond mere comparative analyses, as a distinctive voice in Reformation humanist verse. By providing a translation and commentary, this work aims to promote further studies of neo-Latin literature and its complex interplay with theological and literary traditions.

This research explores the complex and multifaceted portrayal of morality in John Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost. Through a critical analysis of the poem's characters, themes, and moral framework, this study examines the tensions between free will and determinism, obedience and disobedience, and pride and ambition. The research demonstrates how Milton's masterpiece offers a nuanced and profound meditation on the human condition, highlighting the complexities of moral decision-making and the consequences of disobedience

ABSTRACT This article reevaluates Adam’s “commotion strange” in book 8 of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a co-motion or communal movement representing the highest fulfillment of innocent social relationships. Milton’s epic reimagines paradisal passion as a positive collective movement of a united body and soul, not as a turbulent and dangerous feeling. By bringing together Adam’s “commotion” in book 8, Satan’s “compulsion” in book 9, and the fallen couple’s “commiseration” in book 10, this article foregrounds Milton’s paradisal passion as a co-motion produced by relational encounters that has the potential to transport the fallen back to a state of goodness.

ABSTRACT The recent identification of Milton’s marginalia in a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio in the Philadelphia Free Library allows for a reevaluation of the epic poet’s relationship with his dramatic predecessor. This article follows in the footsteps of recent scholarship undertaken in response to the finding. It focuses on Milton’s markings of Romeo and Juliet and traces two interrelated aspects that interested him: the theme of amorous infection, poison, and cure, and the play’s tension between tragic necessity and the possibility of a cure to avert a tragic ending. On the basis of these markings, the article highlights similarities between Romeo and Juliet and book 9 of Paradise Lost, ultimately suggesting that Adam and Eve owe a greater debt to Romeo and Juliet than previously recognized.

Abstract: “Behold the excellence, the power / Which God hath in his mighty Angels plac’d” ( Paradise Lost , 6.637–38); with these words, the angel Raphael announces the primary purpose of the War in Heaven, the poetic glorification of the angels’ God-given supernatural power. Reviving and revising the arguments of the eighteenth-century neoclassical critics of Milton, this article examines the War in Heaven as a glorification of the force of the loyal angels through the literary mode of the sublime. Always connecting the finite and the infinite, Milton’s sublime method of narrating battle does not permit clean distinctions between the legitimate divine use of force and its illegitimate Satanic use. The test of the legitimacy of force is rather the outcome of the heavenly battle. The War in Heaven is thus not a story of weakness overcoming strength but of strength overcoming weakness, a reality which recontextualizes the value of force in Milton’s art and thought.

The Idea of Satan as the Hero of Paradise Lost

Abstract John Milton’s Paradise Lost portrays a conflict between two types of freedom, one espoused by God, the other by Satan. These two freedoms reflect Isaiah Berlin’s definitions of positive and negative liberty. God leaves the angels and Adam and Eve free to choose without interference (negative freedom), while Satan links freedom to self-mastery (positive freedom). An all-powerful, creator God and Satan’s dictatorial leadership result in dependence being a crucial aspect of both versions of freedom; consequently, neither God nor Satan espouses republican liberty. The poem suggests that the freedom created by God, although it relies on an arbitrary deity, is the only possible path to freedom.

Identifying Milton’s “Genial Angel” as the Son of God: An Allusion to Genesis 2:22 in <i>Paradise Lost</i> IV.712-13