Browsing by Subject "John Milton"
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Item Curb'd enthusiasms : critical interventions in the reception of Paradise Lost, 1667-1732(2012-12) Harper, David Andrew; Rumrich, John Peter, 1954-; Bertelsen, Lance; Bruster, Douglas; Lynch, Jack; Marcus, LeahAlthough recent critics have attempted to push the canonization of Paradise Lost ever further into the past, the early reception of Milton’s great poem should be treated as a process rather than as an event inaugurated by the pronouncement of a poet laureate or lord. Inevitably linked to Milton’s Restoration reputation as spokesman for the Protectorate and regicides, Paradise Lost’s reception in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is marked by a series of approaches and retreats, repressions and recoveries. This dissertation examines the critical interventions made by P.H. (traditionally identified as Patrick Hume), John Dennis, Joseph Addison, and Richard Bentley into the reception history of a poem burdened by political and religious baggage. It seeks to illuminate the manner in which these earliest commentators sought to separate Milton’s politics from his poem, rendering the poem “safe” by removing it from contemporary political discourse. Constituting the earliest sustained criticism of any English poem, the efforts of P.H., Dennis, and Addison contribute to our understanding of the development of English literary criticism as a genre. Within the more narrow bounds of Milton scholarship, this dissertation highlights the relationship between the work of the often-neglected critic John Dennis and Addison’s popular Spectator essays. Although Addison and his Spectator essays are often credited with having rediscovered or popularized Paradise Lost, Addison’s suppression of Dennis’s groundbreaking criticism set the tone for much of the later eighteenth-century criticism on Milton. This first critical conflict between a vision of Milton as heterodox and exceptional and one that cast him as orthodox and conservative provides insight into ongoing debates within the field. Addison’s retreat from Dennis’s theory of the enthusiastic sublime into the safer havens of neoclassicism, viewed in concert with newly discovered annotations by Richard Bentley in copies of Paradise Lost and the Spectator essays, helps contextualize Bentley’s infamous 1732 edition of Paradise Lost as more than an aberration in editing history and Milton criticism. While recent criticism has tried to put Bentley’s edition in context as a response to John Toland and an attempt to wrest Milton from the hands of radical Whigs, Joseph Addison had already made that move by neutralizing Dennis’s more radical theories decades prior to Bentley’s edition. Despite attempts by the wits of the day to lump Dennis and Bentley together as common members of a species of dull pedants, it is Addison who stands behind Bentley’s most outrageous interventions in Paradise Lost. In recovering the relationship between Milton’s earliest commentators this dissertation sheds new light upon long and deep-seated currents within Milton criticism.Item Exponential futures : Whig poetry and religious imagination, 1670-1745(2013-05) Stewart, Dustin Donahue; Bertelsen, Lance; Rumrich, John Peter, 1954-; Moore, Lisa; Garrison, James; Haugen, Kristine; Smith, NigelMy dissertation argues that the eighteenth-century Whig writers Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Edward Young, and Mark Akenside remake poetic futurity as they repudiate materialism. Against materialist thinkers who held that souls don’t exist or are inseparable from bodies, the poetry of these English authors sings the freedom of the immortal soul. They far outstrip conventional apologetics, however, by imagining that the soul leaps out of the human body and into new angelic powers. The result is a claim about time: that the soul can separate from the body means for these poets that the future can break from the present. Yet they won’t be patient for newness to come. Reshaping the discourse of enthusiasm, with its promise of ready access to the divine, they also insist that the separated soul’s expansive potential can be claimed for present use. Their verse means to pull futurity’s changes to the present, making available endless possibilities in advance. These writers accordingly complicate familiar scholarly narratives that portray English poetry and theology of their era as oriented to the past. Rowe, Young, and Akenside instead propel souls forward and outward. Their heady visions reflect the Whig writers’ political leanings and their calls for a modern English literary canon that transcends neoclassical values. Although they name Milton as their model and take up his forms and images, they rebrand their hero to conform him to their agenda. The mortalist Milton holds that the souls of the dead can’t persist without bodies: they must wait for a miraculous resurrection to return to consciousness and then God. By refitting Milton’s poetic style to support an attack on materialism, his self-proclaimed successors rein in one aspect of his radical thought even as they amplify a different aspect. In their poems, inspired spirits needn’t stand by for the end of time to be divinized. They already launch into new worlds, communing with other angelic intelligences and exulting in otherworldly passions. The Whig writers offer a far-reaching but surprisingly understudied defense of the poetry they reinvent. They declare that modern religious verse can allow poets and readers to raid the riches of an angelic future.Item Theatricality, Cheap Print, and the Historiography of the English Civil War(2011-08-08) Choi, JaeminUntil recent years, the historical moment of Charles II's return to England was universally accepted as a clear marker of the end of "the Cavalier winter," a welcome victory over theater-hating Puritans. To verify this historical view, literary historians have often glorified the role of King Charles II in the history of the "revival" of drama during the Restoration, whereas they tend to consider the Long Parliament's 1642 closing of the theaters as a decisive manifestation of Puritans' antitheatricalism. This historical perspective based upon what is often known as "the rupture model" has obscured the vibrant development of dramatic forms during the English civil wars and the ways in which the revolutionary energy exploded during this period continued to influence in the Restoration the deployment of dramatic forms and imagination across various social groups. By focusing on the generic development of drama and theatricality during the English civil wars, my dissertation challenges the conventional historiography of the English civil war literature, which has been overemphasizing the discontinuity between the English civil war and the periods before and after it. The first chapter shows how the theatrical energy displaced from traditional cultural domains energized an emerging cheap print market and contributed to the invention of new dramatic forms such as playlets and newsbooks. The second chapter questions the conventional association of Puritanism and antitheatricalism by rehistoricizing antitheatrical writers and their pamphlets and by highlighting the dramatic impulses at work in Puritan iconoclasm during the English civil wars. The final chapter offers the Restoration Milton as a case study to illustrate how the proposed historical perspective replacing "the rupture model" better explains not only the politics of Milton's Paradise Lost but also of Restoration drama.