Re-membering Milton

Essays on the Texts and Traditions

Mary Nyquist, Margaret W. Ferguson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367139742
• eBook ISBN: 9780429639241
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1987. Passionately praised and equally passionately criticised by contemporary and later writers, the figure of Milton inherited by the twentieth century is by no means unified, despite the appearance of monumental unity his work sometimes acquires in the classroom and in academic criticism.

This collection of essays gathers together disparate and often conflicting representations of Milton as author and cultural figure. Critics familiar with the traditions of Milton scholarship and with debates in literary theory reconstruct Milton from evidence provided by his own prose and poetry, by his contemporaries (including some little-known women writers), by Romantics such as Blake and Wordsworth, and, finally, by a tradition of Afro-American writing that reflects Milton's influence in ways previously unexamined by critics. The process of reconstruction can also be seen as a process of "re-membering." The volume draws inspiration from, but also interrogates, the figure used in Areopagita to describe the quest for truth. Likening Truth to the dismembered body of Osiris, Milton urges Truth's friends to seek up and down, gathering "limb by limb" the body scattered through time and space.

Re-membering Milton includes work by established critics from both sides of the Atlantic. Together these contributors place Milton and different Milton traditions firmly within the arenas of modem critical debate. As a result, the collection will be of interest to a wide range of readers: scholars concerned with Milton and Renaissance literature and history; advanced undergraduates and graduate students; researchers in women's studies; and all readers generally concerned with trends in literary and cultural theory.

Index

ABBREVIATIONS Areop.: Areopagitica; PL: Paradise Lost; PR: Paradise Regained; SA: Samson Agonistes; Tetra.: Tetrachordon

Abdiel

as foil for Satan 330

as model for poet 219

Abercrombie, Nicholas 70n

Abraham

in Blake’s Milton 269

and Samson 156

Abraham, Nicholas 232n

Adam 143, 181, 183–4, 187, 190–4, 220, 224, 228, 268

in Afro-American literature 292–3

creation of 99–127n

and love 303–15

and Satan 331–9

and Wisdom 201–7

Adorno, Theodor 149

Aers, David 126n–7n

Ahl, Frederick M. 145n

Aitzema, Leo 96n

Alderman, Hyman 147n

allegory 55, 226, 347

of class, in Comus 65–7

of emergence of sexuality 53

historical, in “Nativity Ode” 44–5

political, in PL 209n

religious 46–7, 51–2, 70n

in SA 148, 167

in Spenser 223

Allen, Don Cameron 232n

Althusser, Louis 65–6, 70n, 152

Ambrose, St 206

Anglican Church 45, 47, 51–2

Apuleius 38

Arianism 207, 217, 348

Ariosto, Lodovico 218

Aristotle 231n, 250

Arminianism 71n, 150, 155–6, 164

...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• I The author function
• II Texts in their contemporary contexts
• III The written word
• IV Re-memberings
• Index