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"Despite its canonical prestige, Edmund Spenser's epic six-part poem The Faerie Queene (1590-96) has never been easy or altogether pleasurable to read. As this book describes, the poem's first known reader, Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, did so under duress, and returned the manuscript with a plea that Spenser write something else instead. Virginia Woolf's tongue-in-cheek advice to twentieth-century readers eager to cultivate a taste for The Faerie Queene-"The first essential is, of course, not to read The Faerie Queene"-sums up a tradition of readerly resistance to the poem. As a consequence of its difficulty, the poem has an extraordinary capacity to induce doubt in readers-about Spenser...
Milton consistently reflected a concern for reassembling Truth in a wide-ranging body of works in different genres and on stunningly diverse topics. Similarly, the twelve contributors to this collection represent efforts to engage in the search for Truth in the works of Milton, to re-analyze, reinterpret, and recontextualize his literary, political, religious, and social views and values, and to reassess the influence of his writings.
Yearly volume containing twelve essays on topics from Shakespeare to Middleton, Donne, Propertius, political resistance and legitimation, Elizabethan anthologies, and Milton. This volume collects the best scholarly essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference in 2006. Two focus on Shakespeare: one on twins in The Comedy of Errors, one on differences between the Quarto and Folio versions of the reunion of Lear and Cordelia. Three essays deal with non-Shakespearean drama, examining the unvarying prefatory matter in frequently reprinted dramatic texts, economic systems in Middleton's city comedy, and theoriesof political resistance in revenge tragedy. Political resistance is also...
This volume analyzes the development of textual theory and practice in the twentieth century, questioning not just the assumptions and methodologies of textual study but the very genesis of textual study and current definitions of the field. Each contributor tackles a specific theoretical or practical issue in essays that cover feminist practice, editorial procedure, political ideology, practical dramaturgy, and sixteenth- and twentieth-century history. The result is a volume at once wide-ranging and detailed, of interest and value to cultural historians as well as to textual scholars.
An accessible, up-to-date introduction to the life and works of poet and dramatist Ben Jonson.
The nineteen essays in this collection explore such varied fields of argument as John Milton's authorship of the Christian Doctrine, his adaptations of source material, his engagement in political controversies, his attitudes toward gender in Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, and his reflection of seventeenth-century obstetrics and anticipation of modern chaos theory in Paradise Lost. In their sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, and consistently interrogative views of Milton and his work, these essays offer an "arena of conflict" for future studies.
"Although the scholars represented in this collection apply different theoretical approaches to their examinations of Milton's poetry and prose, they all challenge earlier critical assumptions and are evidence of the energizing dialogue that occurs when readers converse with each other and engage in dialogue with the many voices of a spokesperson such as John Milton."--BOOK JACKET.
A collection of innovative examinations of embodiment in Milton’s oeuvre that challenge assumptions about disciplinary boundaries This volume brings unprecedented focus to the forms, spaces, and implications of embodied motion in Milton’s writing and its afterlives to explore how and why he privileges the body—human and textual—as a site of dynamic movement. The contributors bring a variety of lenses to Milton’s moving bodies: political history, kinematics, mathematics, cosmology, translation, illustration, anatomies of racialized and disabled bodies, and twenty-first-century pedagogies. From these wide-ranging vantage points, they consider anew Milton’s contributions to the histories of scientific development, global exploration and imperial expansion, migration and diaspora, and translation and adaptation in England, Europe, and the Americas, from the early modern period to today. Milton’s Moving Bodies draws together established and emerging scholars, offering fresh analyses of the poet’s legacy for multiple traditions within and beyond Milton studies.
This volume proposes a method for reading Milton's De Doctrina Christiana as an artifact of his process of theological thinking rather than as a repository of his doctrinal views. Jason A. Kerr argues that reading in this way involves attention to the complex material state of the manuscript along with Milton's varying modes of engagement with scripture and various theological interlocutors, and reveals that Milton's approach to theology underwent significant change in the course of his work on the treatise. Initially, Milton set out to use Ramist logic to organize scripture in a way that drew out its intrinsic doctrinal structure. This method had two unintended consequences: it drove Milton...
In The Reason of Church Government, a thirty-three-year-old John Milton writes of his hope that by labour and intent study... joyn'd with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die. Even the young Milton, committed as he was to achieving a place in the annals of poetic history, might have been surprised by the strenuous efforts in aftertimes to keep his legacy alive. The fifteen essays that comprise this collection focus, from varied perspectives, on Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and A Mask, poems that have attracted sustained critical attention. Several consider shorter poems, such as the Nativity Od...