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This book offers a revisionist account of poetry and embodiment from Milton to Romanticism. Scholars have made much of the period's theories of matter, with some studies equating the eighteenth century's modernity with its materialism. Yet the Enlightenment in Britain also brought bold new arguments for the immateriality of spirit and evocative claims about an imminent spirit realm. Protestant religious writing was of two minds about futurity, swinging back and forth between patience for the resurrected body and desire for the released soul. This ancient pattern carried over, the book argues, into understandings of poetry as a modern devotional practice. A range of authors agreed that poems ...
A collection examining representations of the embodied self in the writings of Milton and his contemporaries.
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Is war the opposite of peace, or its necessary accomplice? Exploring this question in relation to eighteenth-century Britain, Andrew Lincoln opens up complex, paradoxical and enduring issues and shows how ideas and methods were developed to provide the British public with moral insulation from violence both overseas and at home.
Singing by Herself reinterprets the rise of literary loneliness by foregrounding the female and feminized figures who have been overlooked in previous histories of solitude. Many of the earliest records of the terms "lonely" and "loneliness" in British literature describe solitaries whose songs positioned them within the tradition of female complaint. Amelia Worsley shows how these feminized solitaries, for whom loneliness was both a space of danger and a space of productive retreat, helped to make loneliness attractive to future lonely poets, despite the sense of suspicion it evoked. Although loneliness today is often associated with states of atomized interiority, soliloquy, and self-enclo...
"Explores Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs, demonstrating that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters"--Publisher.
This book considers a moment at the turn of the nineteenth century, when literature and medicine seemed embattled in rivalry, to find the fields collaborating to develop interpretive analogies that saw literary texts as organic bodies and anatomical features as legible texts.
William Poole recounts Milton's life as England’s self-elected national poet and explains how the greatest poem of the English language came to be written. How did a blind man compose this staggeringly complex, intensely visual work? Poole explores how Milton’s life and preoccupations inform the poem itself—its structure, content, and meaning.
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Challenging the idea that a writer’s work reflects his experiences in time and place, Andrew M. Cooper locates the action of William Blake’s major illuminated books in the ahistorical present, an impersonal spirit realm beyond the three-dimensional self. Blake, Cooper shows, was a formalist who exploited eighteenth-century scientific and philosophical research on vision, sense, and mind for spiritual purposes. Through irony, dialogism, two-way syntax, and synesthesia, Blake extended and refined the prophetic method Milton forged in Paradise Lost to bring the performativity of traditional oral song and storytelling into print. Cooper argues that historicist attempts to place Blake’s vision in perspective, as opposed to seeing it for oneself, involve a deeply self-contradictory denial of his performativity as a poet-artist. Rather, Blake’s expansion of linear reading into a space of creative, self-conscious collaboration laid the basis for his lifelong critique of dualism in religion and science, and anticipated the non-Euclidean geometrics of twentieth-century Modernism.