Cosmos And Character In Paradise Lost

Author : M. Sarkar
Publisher : Springer
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2012-06-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781137007001

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Cosmos and Character in Paradise Lost by M. Sarkar Pdf

This book offers a fresh contextual reading of Paradise Lost that suggests that a recovery of the vital intellectual ferment of the new science, magic, and alchemy of the seventeenth century reveals new and unexpected aspects of Milton's cosmos and chaos, and the characters of the angels and Adam and Eve. After examining the contextual references to cabalism, hermeticism, and science in the invocations and in the presentation of chaos and Night, the book focuses on the central stage of the epic action, Milton's unique cosmos, at once finite and infinite, with its re-orientation of compass points. While Milton relies on the new astronomy, optics and mechanics in configuring his cosmos, he draws upon alchemy to suggest that the imagined prelapsarian cosmos is the crucible within which vital re-orientations of authority could have taken place.

Author : Lawrence Babb
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 184 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 1970
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : UOM:39076006208123

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The Moral Cosmos of Paradise Lost by Lawrence Babb Pdf

Author : Dennis Danielson
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2014-11-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781107033603

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Paradise Lost and the Cosmological Revolution by Dennis Danielson Pdf

This volume brings John Milton's Paradise Lost into dialogue with the challenges of cosmology and the world of Galileo, whom Milton met and admired: a universe encompassing space travel, an earth that participates vibrantly in the cosmic dance, and stars that are "world[s] / Of destined habitation." Milton's bold depiction of our universe as merely a small part of a larger multiverse allows the removal of hell from the center of the earth to a location in the primordial abyss. In this wide-ranging work, Dennis Danielson lucidly unfolds early modern cosmological debates, engaging not only Galileo but also Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, and the English Copernicans, thus placing Milton at a rich crossroads of epic poetry and the history of science.

Author : Björn Quiring
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 570 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2020-12-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000289800

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Trials of Nature by Björn Quiring Pdf

Focusing on John Milton’s Paradise Lost , this book investigates the metaphorical identification of nature with a court of law – an old and persistent trope, haunted by ancient aporias, at the intersection of jurisprudence, philosophy and literature. In an enormous variety of texts, from the Greek beginnings of Western literature onward, nature has been described as a courtroom in which an all- encompassing trial takes place and a universal verdict is executed. The first, introductory part of this study sketches an overview of the metaphor’s development in European history, from antiquity to the seventeenth century. In its second, more extensive part, the book concentrates on Milton’s epic Paradise Lost in which the problem of the natural law court finds one of its most fascinating and detailed articulations. Using conceptual tools provided by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Hans Blumenberg, Gilles Deleuze, William Empson and Alfred North Whitehead, the study demonstrates that the conflicts in Milton’s epic revolve around the tension between a universal legal procedure inherent in nature and the positive legal decrees of the deity. The divine rule is found to consolidate itself by Nature’s supplementary shadow government; their inconsistencies are not flaws, but rather fundamental rhetorical assets, supporting a law that is inherently "double- formed". In Milton’s world, human beings are thus confronted with a twofold law that entraps them in its endlessly proliferating double binds, whether they obey or not. The analysis of this strange juridical structure can open up new perspectives on Milton’s epic, as well as on the way legal discourse tends to entangle norms with facts and thus to embed itself in human life. This original and intriguing book will appeal not only to those engaged in the study of Milton, but also to anyone interested in the relationship between law, history, literature and philosophy.

Author : Thomas Matthew Vozar
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2023-11-14
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198875963

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Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century by Thomas Matthew Vozar Pdf

No author in the English canon seems more deserving of the epithet sublime than John Milton. Yet Milton's sublimity has long been dismissed as an invention of eighteenth-century criticism. The poet himself, the story goes, could hardly have had any notion of the sublime, a concept that only took shape in the decades after his death with the advent of philosophical aesthetics. Such a narrative, however, fails to account for the fact that Milton is one of the first writers in English to refer to Longinus, the author traditionally associated with the Ancient Greek treatise On the Sublime. This book argues that Milton did have an idea of the sublime—one that came to him from Longinus but also from a larger classical tradition that offered a pre-aesthetic predecessor to the aesthetic concept of the sublime. Thomas Vozar shows that Longinus was better known in early modern England than has been previously appreciated; that various notions of sublimity beyond that of Longinus would have been available to Milton and his contemporaries; and that such notions of the sublime were integral to Milton's rhetorical, scientific, and theological imagination. Additional material relating to the early modern reception of Longinus is provided in the appendices, which contain the first bibliographical study of copies of Longinus in English private libraries to 1674 and an edition of a newly discovered seventeenth-century English translation of Longinus. Far from being anachronistic, Milton's "abstracted sublimities" touch on almost every aspect of his thought, from rhetoric to politics, from science to theology. Making substantive contributions to literary scholarship, classical reception studies, and the history of ideas, Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century returns the sublime to its proper place at the forefront of Milton criticism, re-evaluates the diffusion of Longinian texts and concepts in early modern Europe, and records a crucial missing chapter in the history of the sublime.

Author : Thomas Festa,David Ainsworth
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2021-11-16
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781949979732

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Locating Milton by Thomas Festa,David Ainsworth Pdf

Locating Milton: Places and Perspectives collects nine previously unpublished essays that examine Milton’s works as the product of his unique intellectual experiences at home and abroad, while also tracing the ways in which those works themselves express the influence of his travel, his reading, and his political engagement. Following an interpretive introduction that seeks to locate Milton through his last surviving letter, the first group of essays examine how young Milton locates himself through his travels in Italy, how Milton’s early reading leads him to situate himself intellectually, and how the intellectual framework Milton generated remains pertinent to students and communities today. The second group calculates the impact of early modern mathematical and scientific models on Milton’s cosmology, demonstrating how Milton’s complex negotiations of such models give form and perspective to his greatest poetic works. The final group of essays locates Milton distinctly through his works’ global reception, ranging from the anonymous English poem Praeexistence, to Milton’s place in the “new world” and science fiction, to his presence as a figure inspiring political resistance in communist Hungary.

Author : Catherine G. Martin
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 220 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2019-04-23
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780429595509

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Milton in the New Scientific Age by Catherine G. Martin Pdf

Milton and the New Scientific Age represents significant advantages over all previous volumes on the subject of Milton and science, as it includes contributions from top scholars and prominent beginners in a broad number of fields. Most of these fields have long dominated work in both Milton and seventeenth-century studies, but they have previously not included the relatively new and revolutionary topic of early modern chemistry, physiology, and medicine. Previously this subject was confined to the history of science, with little if any attention to its literary development, even though it prominently appears in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which also includes early "science fiction" speculations on aliens ignored by most readers. Both of these oversights are corrected in this essay collection, while more traditional areas of research have been updated. They include Milton’s relationship both to Bacon and the later or Royal Society Baconians, his views on astronomy, and his "vitalist" views on biology and cosmology. In treating these topics, our contributors are not mired in speculations about whether or not Milton was on the cutting edge of early science or science fiction, for, as nearly all of them show, the idea of a "cutting edge" is deeply anachronistic at a time when most scientists and scientific enthusiasts held both fully modern and backward-looking beliefs. By treating these combinations contextually, Milton’s literary contributions to the "new science" are significantly clarified along with his many contemporary sources, all of which merit study in their own right.

Author : E.L. Risden
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 195 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2024-02-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781476694931

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Pleasures of Literary Spatiality by E.L. Risden Pdf

Barring such illnesses as claustrophobia or agoraphobia, or situations such as medical isolation or incarceration, most people move naturally from smaller to larger spaces and back again without giving the process much thought. But paying attention to our own movement in space yields all sorts of sensory experiences from something relaxing to something terrifying or even astonishingly beautiful. Our sense of expandable/contractible space can influence how we process everything from Japanese gardens to mountain hikes and desert expanses. Writers often expand or contract spaces around their characters for dramatic effect, character building, and even thematic purposes. Marie de France used expanded spaces for adventure and travel and contracted spaces first for romance, and then for spiritual devotion. Chaucer used expanded spaces for adventure, pilgrimage, and danger and contracted spaces for conviviality and storytelling. Dante and Milton created expansive cosmologies but focused on small spaces for both suffering and incredible spiritual achievement. This study of literary spatiality yields fascinating results, reflects useful techniques for reading, and reminds us of the value of all sorts of different approaches to analysis and artistic enjoyment.

Author : Kristin Flieger Samuelian
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2021-05-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000387780

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The Moving Body and the English Romantic Imaginary by Kristin Flieger Samuelian Pdf

The Moving Body and the English Romantic Imaginary explores ways in which England in the Romantic period conceptualized its relation both to its constituent parts within the United Kingdom and to the larger world through discussions of dance, dancing, and dancers, and through theories of dance and performance. As a referent that both engaged and constructed the body—through physical training, anatomization, spectacle and spectatorship, pathology, parody, and sentiment—dance worked to produce an English exceptional body. Discussions of dance in fiction and periodical essays, as well as its visual representation in print culture, were important ways to theorize points of contact as England was investing itself in the world as an economic and imperial power during and after the Revolutionary period. These formulations offer dance as an engine for the reconfiguration of gender, class, and national identity in the print culture of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.

Author : Katherine Eggert
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2015-10-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780812291889

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Disknowledge by Katherine Eggert Pdf

"Disknowledge": knowing something isn't true, but believing it anyway. In Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England, Katherine Eggert explores the crumbling state of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Even as the shortcomings of Renaissance humanism became plain to see, many intellectuals of the age had little choice but to treat their familiar knowledge systems as though they still held. Humanism thus came to share the status of alchemy: a way of thinking simultaneously productive and suspect, reasonable and wrongheaded. Eggert argues that English writers used alchemy to signal how to avoid or camouflage pressing but discomfiting topics in an age of rapid intellectual change. Disknowledge describes how John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Dee, Christopher Marlowe, William Harvey, Helkiah Crooke, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare used alchemical imagery, rhetoric, and habits of thought to shunt aside three difficult questions: how theories of matter shared their physics with Roman Catholic transubstantiation; how Christian Hermeticism depended on Jewish Kabbalah; and how new anatomical learning acknowledged women's role in human reproduction. Disknowledge further shows how Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Margaret Cavendish used the language of alchemy to castigate humanism for its blind spots and to invent a new, posthumanist mode of knowledge: writing fiction. Covering a wide range of authors and topics, Disknowledge is the first book to analyze how English Renaissance literature employed alchemy to probe the nature and limits of learning. The concept of disknowledge—willfully adhering to something we know is wrong—resonates across literary and cultural studies as an urgent issue of our own era.

Author : Thomas N. Corns
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 422 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2012-01-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780300094442

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The Milton Encyclopedia by Thomas N. Corns Pdf

"A resource for the general reader, the student, and the scholar alike that provides easy access to a wealth of information to enhance the experience of reading the works of John Milton"--

Author : Douglas S. Pfeiffer
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 486 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2022
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198714163

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Authorial Personality and the Making of Renaissance Texts by Douglas S. Pfeiffer Pdf

Studying texts by Lorenzo Valla, Erasmus, Saint Jerome, George Gascoigne, and Fulke Greville, this volume explores authorial character as an instrument of textual analysis in the scholarship of early Renaissance literature.

Author : Pamela Gossin
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2017-03-02
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781351879255

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Thomas Hardy's Novel Universe by Pamela Gossin Pdf

In this, the first book-length study of astronomy in Hardy's writing, historian of science and literary scholar Pamela Gossin brings the analytical tools of both disciplines to bear as she offers unexpected and sophisticated readings of seven novels that enrich Darwinian and feminist perspectives on his work, extend formalist evaluations of his achievement as a writer, and provide fresh interpretations of enigmatic passages and scenes. In an elegantly crafted introduction, Gossin draws together the shared critical values and methods of literary studies and the history of science to articulate a hybrid model of scholarly interpretation and analysis that promotes cross-disciplinary compassion and understanding within the current contention of the science/culture wars. She then situates Hardy's own deeply interdisciplinary knowledge of astronomy and cosmology within both literary and scientific traditions, from the ancient world through the Victorian era. Gossin offers insightful new assessments of A Pair of Blue Eyes, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, Two on a Tower, The Woodlanders, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, arguing that Hardy's personal synthesis of ancient and modern astronomy with mythopoetic and scientific cosmologies enabled him to write as a literary cosmologist for the post-Darwinian world. The profound new myths that comprise Hardy's novel universe can be read as a sustained set of literary thought-experiments by which he critiques the possibilities, limitations, and dangers of living out the storylines that such imaginative cosmologies project for his time - and ours.

Author : John Milton,Gustave Doré
Publisher : Legare Street Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2022-10-27
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 1019070595

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Paradise Lost, Book 3 by John Milton,Gustave Doré Pdf

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Author : John Andrew Himes
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 518 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 1878
Category : Electronic
ISBN : HARVARD:32044024326159

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A Study of Milton's Paradise Lost by John Andrew Himes Pdf