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Milosz: A Biography
by Andrzej FranaszekAndrzej Franaszek’s award-winning biography of Czeslaw Milosz—winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—recounts the poet’s odyssey through WWI, the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazi invasion of Poland, and the USSR’s postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. This edition contains a new introduction by the translators, along with maps and a chronology.
Milton Now
by Catharine Gray Erin MurphyBy bringing together Milton specialists with other innovative early modern scholars, the collection aims to embrace and encourage a methodologically adventurous study of Milton's works, analyzing them both in relation to their own moment and their many ensuing contexts.
Milton among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism
by Catherine Gimelli MartinSolidly grounded in Milton's prose works and the long history of Milton scholarship, Milton among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism challenges many received ideas about Milton's brand of Christianity, philosophy, and poetry. It does so chiefly by retracing his history as a great "Puritan poet" and reexamining the surprisingly tenuous Whig paradigm upon which this history has been built. Catherine Martin not only questions the current habit of "lumping" Milton with the religious Puritans but agrees with a long line of literary scholars who find his values and lifestyle markedly inconsistent with their beliefs and practices. Pursuing this argument, Martin carefully reexamines the whole spectrum of seventeenth-century English Puritanism from the standpoint of the most recent and respected scholarship on the subject. Martin also explores other, more secular sources of Milton's thought, including his Baconianism, his Christian Stoic ethics, and his classical republicanism; she establishes the importance of these influences through numerous direct references, silent but clear citations, and typical tropes. All in all, Milton among the Puritans presents a radical reassessment of Milton's religious identity; it shows that many received ideas about the "Puritan Milton" are neither as long-established as most scholars believe nor as historically defensible as most literary critics still assume, and resituates Milton's great poems in the period when they were written, the Restoration.
Milton and Maternal Mortality
by Louis SchwartzAll too often, childbirth in early modern England was associated with fear, suffering and death, and this melancholy preoccupation weighed heavily on the seventeenth-century mind. This landmark study examines John Milton's life and work, uncovering evidence of the poet's engagement with maternal mortality and the dilemmas it presented. Drawing on both literary scholarship and up-to-date historical research, Louis Schwartz provides important new readings of Milton's poetry, including Paradise Lost, as well as a wide-ranging survey of the medical practices and religious beliefs that surrounded the perils of childbirth. The reader is granted a richer understanding of how seventeenth-century society struggled to come to terms with its fears, and how one of its most important poets gave voice to that struggle.
Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost
by William Poole&“An authoritative, and accessible, introduction to Milton&’s life and an engaging examination of the process of composing Paradise Lost&” (Choice). In early 1642 Milton promised English readers a work of literature so great that &“they should not willingly let it die.&” Twenty-five years later, the epic poem Paradise Lost appeared in print. In the interim, however, the poet had gone totally blind and had also become a controversial public figure―a man who had argued for the abolition of bishops, freedom of the press, the right to divorce, and the prerogative of a nation to depose and put to death an unsatisfactory ruler. These views had rendered him an outcast. William Poole devotes particular attention to Milton&’s personal life: his reading and education, his ambitions and anxieties, and the way he presented himself to the world. Although always a poet first, Milton was also a theologian and civil servant, vocations that informed the composition of his masterpiece. At the emotional center of this narrative is the astounding fact that Milton lost his sight in 1652. How did a blind man compose this intensely visual work? Poole opens up the world of Milton&’s masterpiece to modern readers, first by exploring Milton&’s life and intellectual preoccupations and then by explaining the poem itself―its structure, content, and meaning. &“Poole&’s book may well become what he shows Paradise Lost soon became: a classic.&” —Times Literary Supplement &“Smart and original . . . Demonstrates with astonishing exactitude how Milton&’s life and―most impressively of all―his reading enabled this epic.&” ―The Spectator &“This deeply learned and lucidly written book . . . makes this most ambitious of early modern poets accessible to his modern readers.&” ―Journal of British Studies
Milton and the Politics of Public Speech
by Helen LynchUsing Hannah Arendt’s account of the Greek polis to explain Milton’s fascination with the idea of public speech, this study reveals what is distinctive about his conception of a godly, republican oratory and poetics. The book shows how Milton uses rhetorical theory - its ideas, techniques and image patterns - to dramatise the struggle between ’good’ and ’bad’ oratory, and to fashion his own model of divinely inspired public utterance. Connecting his polemical and imaginative writing in new ways, the book discusses the subliminal rhetoric at work in Milton’s political prose and the systematic scrutiny of the power of oratory in his major poetry. By setting Milton in the context of other Civil War polemicists, of classical political theory and its early modern reinterpretations, and of Renaissance writing on rhetoric and poetic language, the book sheds new light on his work across several genres, culminating in an extended Arendtian reading of his ’Greek’ drama Samson Agonistes.
Milton and the Post-Secular Present
by Feisal G. MohamedOur post-secular present, argues Feisal Mohamed, has much to learn from our pre-secular past. Through a consideration of poet and polemicist John Milton, this book explores current post-secularity, an emerging category that it seeks to clarify and critique. It examines ethical and political engagement grounded in belief, with particular reference to the thought of Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, and Gayatri C. Spivak. Taken to an extreme, such engagement produces the cult of the suicide bomber. But the suicide bomber has also served as a convenient bogey for those wishing to distract us from the violence in Western and Christian traditions and for those who would dismiss too easily the vigorous iconoclasm that belief can produce. More than any other poet, Milton alerts us to both anti-humane and liberationist aspects of belief and shows us relevant dynamics of language by which such commitment finds expression.
Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity
by Jeffrey ShoulsonTaking as its starting point the long-standing characterization of Milton as a "Hebraic" writer, Milton and the Rabbis probes the limits of the relationship between the seventeenth-century English poet and polemicist and his Jewish antecedents. Shoulson's analysis moves back and forth between Milton's writings and Jewish writings of the first five centuries of the Common Era, collectively known as midrash. In exploring the historical and literary implications of these connections, Shoulson shows how Milton's text can inform a more nuanced reading of midrash just as midrash can offer new insights into Paradise Lost.Shoulson is unconvinced of a direct link between a specific collection of rabbinic writings and Milton's works. He argues that many of Milton's poetic ideas that parallel midrash are likely to have entered Christian discourse not only through early modern Christian Hebraicists but also through Protestant writers and preachers without special knowledge of Hebrew. At the heart of Shoulson's inquiry lies a fundamental question: When is an idea, a theme, or an emphasis distinctively Judaic or Hebraic and when is it Christian? The difficulty in answering such questions reveals and highlights the fluid interaction between ostensibly Jewish, Hellenistic, and Christian modes of thought not only during the early modern period but also early in time when rabbinic Judaism and Christianity began.
Milton's Latin Poems
by David R. SlavittIn this collection, esteemed poet and translator David R. Slavitt brings to life John Milton’s Latin poetry with deft, imaginative modern English translations.While Milton is recognized as one of the most learned English poets in history, his Latin poetry is less well known. Slavitt’s careful rendering brings Milton’s Latin poems—many written in his late teens—into the present. He keeps true to the style of the originals, showing Milton’s maturing poetic voice and the freedom he found working in Latin. On the Gunpowder PlotO, sly Guy Fawkes, you plotted against your king and the British lords, but did you intend to be kindand make up for your malice in this thing with at least a show of piety? Do we findan intention, perhaps, of sending the members of court up to the sky in a chariot made of firethe way Elijah traveled. Or do I distort the simple wickedness of your desire?Featuring an introduction by Gordon Teskey, this comprehensive English-language collection of Milton’s Latin poems pays due respect to a master. Poetry lovers, Milton fans, and scholars of either will welcome, enjoy, and learn from this work.
Milton's Secrecy: And Philosophical Hermeneutics (Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity)
by James Dougal FlemingScientific modernity treats interpretation as a matter of discovery. Discovery, however, may not be all that matters about interpretation. In Milton's Secrecy, J. D. Fleming argues that the poetry and prose of John Milton (1608-1674) are about the presentation of a radically different hermeneutic model. This is based on openness within language, rather than on secrets within the world. Milton's representations of meaning are exoteric, not esoteric; recognitive, not inventive. Milton's Secrecy places its titular subject in opposition to the epistemology of modern natural science, and to the interpretative assumptions that science supports. At the same time, the book places Milton within early modern contexts of interpretation and knowledge. Drawing on Renaissance Neoplatonism, Tudor-Stuart ideology, and the Calvinist theory of conscience, Milton's Secrecy argues that the attempt to theorize interpretation without discovery is not unorthodox within early modern English culture. If anything, Milton's hostility to secrecy and discovery aligns him with his culture's ethical and hermeneutic ideal. Milton's Secrecy provides an historical framework for considering the theoretical validity of this ideal, by aligning it with the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Milton's Uncertain Eden: Understanding Place in Paradise Lost (Studies in Major Literary Authors)
by Andrew MattisonThis study describes a variety of ways of thinking about place in the Renaissance and in Paradise Lost. Despite coming from different perspectives, they have in common the idea that the difficulty of the relationship of reciprocity that poetic subjects often expect from their environment destabilizes those subjects’ understanding, not only of environment, but of themselves. The study explores destabilization as it affects aspects of the poem from Adam’s sense of the landscape of Eden and the meaning of the Fall itself, to the relationship the ambiguous landscapes of Paradise Lost create between Adam and Eve, the poet and the reader; all of whom are struggling to make sense of the same problematically described places. To a surprisingly large extent, the description of prelapsarian Eden and the events that go on within it have in common a failed attempt to understand the nature of the surroundings. In observing the centrality and difficultly of this poetic discourse of place, the problem of place is found at the very heart of the Fall.
Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood
by Elizabeth SauerJohn Milton lived at a time when English nationalism became entangled with principles and policies of cultural, religious, and ethnic tolerance. Combining political theory with close readings of key texts, this study examines how Milton's polemical and imaginative prose intersects with representations of English Protestant nationhood. Through detailed case studies of Milton's works, Elizabeth Sauer charts the fluctuating narrative of Milton's literary engagements in relation to social, political, and philosophical themes such as ecclesiology, exclusionism, Irish alterity, natural law, disestablishment, geography, and intermarriage. In so doing, Sauer shows the extent to which nationhood and toleration can be subjected to literary and historicist inquiry. Her study makes a salient contribution to Milton studies and to scholarship on early modern literature and the development of the early nation-state.
Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form (Routledge Revivals)
by Christopher KendrickFirst published in 1986, this title critiques the canonical view of Milton as an isolated Great Man, and reassesses the impact of the Puritan Revolution on two of his major works: the Areopagitica and Paradise Lost. The study focuses on the emergence of a discreet ethical framework of thought within the dominant theological code of these two works, arguing that this framework – integral to Protestantism – is also crucial to the construction of subjectivity under capitalism. Through an analysis of the rhetorical strategies of the Areopagitica and the generic composition of Paradise Lost, Christopher Kendrick demonstrates that Milton’s ‘individualism’ both affirms the success of the Puritan Revolution and also exposes the contradictions between the capitalist subject’s ethical freedom and the world of necessity of which that freedom is part.
Milton: Everyman's Poetry
by John MiltonBest known for his epic masterpiece Paradise Lost, Milton is also a master of subtle lyric harmony. He is one of the greatest writers of the 17th century, and of all time.
Milton: Poems
by John MiltonThe Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover series is popular for its compact size and reasonable price which does not compromise content. Poems: Milton contains selections from Milton's work, including sonnets, occasional poems, portions of Comus, Samson Agonistes, as well as Books I--XII of Paradise Lost.
Milton’s Visual Imagination
by Stephen B. DobranskiCritics have traditionally found fault with the descriptions and images in John Milton's poetry and thought of him as an author who wrote for the ear more than the eye. In Milton's Visual Imagination, Stephen B. Dobranski proposes that, on the contrary, Milton enriches his biblical source text with acute and sometimes astonishing visual details. He contends that Milton's imagery - traditionally disparaged by critics - advances the epic's narrative while expressing the author's heterodox beliefs. In particular, Milton exploits the meaning of objects and gestures to overcome the inherent difficulty of his subject and to accommodate seventeenth-century readers. Bringing together Milton's material philosophy with an analysis of both his poetic tradition and cultural circumstances, this book is a major contribution to our understanding of early modern visual culture as well as of Milton's epic.
Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets
by Linda A. KinnahanIn Mina Loy, Twentieth-Century Photography, and Contemporary Women Poets, Linda A. Kinnahan explores the making of Mina Loy’s late modernist poetics in relation to photography’s ascendance, by the mid-twentieth century, as a distinctively modern force shaping representation and perception. As photography develops over the course of the century as an art form, social tool, and cultural force, Loy’s relationship to a range of photographic cultures emerging in the first half of the twentieth century suggests how we might understand not only the intriguing work of this poet, but also the shaping impact of photography and new technologies of vision upon modernist poetics. Framing Loy’s encounters with photography through intersections of portraiture, Surrealism, fashion, documentary, and photojournalism, Kinnahan draws correspondences between Loy’s late poetry and visual discourses of the body, urban poverty, and war, discerning how a visual rhetoric of gender often underlies these mappings and connections. In her final chapter, Kinnahan examines two contemporary poets who directly engage the camera’s modern impact –Kathleen Fraser and Caroline Bergvall – to explore the questions posed in their work about the particular relation of the camera, the photographic image, and the construction of gender in the late twentieth century.
Mind Platter
by Najwa Zebian<p><i>Mind Platter</i> is a compilation of reflections on life as seen through the eyes of an educator, student, and human who experienced her early days in silence. It is written in the words of a woman who came from Lebanon to Canada at the age of sixteen and experienced what it was like to have fate push her to a place where she didn't belong. It is written in the voice of every person who has felt unheard, mistreated, misjudged, or unseen. <p>The book contains over 200 one-page reflections on topics we encounter in our everyday lives: love, friendship, hurt, inspiration, respect, motivation, integrity, honesty, and more. Mind Platter is not about the words it contains, but what the reader makes of them. May this book give a voice to those who need one, be a crying shoulder for those who yearn for someone to listen, and inspire those who need a reminder of the power they have over their lives.</p>
Mindscapes: Poems for the Real World
by Richard PeckMindscapes brings together the very best of two centuries of writing on the vicissitudes of altered consciousness.
Mine Mine Mine (African Poetry Book)
by Uhuru Portia PhalafalaMine Mine Mine is a personal narration of Uhuru Portia Phalafala&’s family&’s experience of the migrant labor system brought on by the gold mining industry in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using geopoetics to map geopolitics, Phalafala follows the death of her grandfather during a historic juncture in 2018, when a silicosis class action lawsuit against the mining industry in South Africa was settled in favor of the miners. Phalafala ties the catastrophic effects of gold mining on the miners and the environment in Johannesburg to the destruction of Black lives, the institution of the Black family, and Black sociality. Her epic poem addresses racial capitalism, bringing together histories of the transatlantic and trans-Indian slave trades, of plantation economies, and of mining and prison-industrial complexes. As inheritor of the migrant labor lineage, she uses her experience to explore how Black women carry intergenerational trauma of racial capitalism in their bodies and intersects the personal and national, continental and diasporic narration of this history within a critical race framework.
Mining For Sun
by John ReibetanzShortlisted for the 2001 ReLit Awards John Reibetanz is good on grief: "You, mother,/ dying, left what was hard first:/ bones weeping into/ / your veins like flutes, teeth/ vanished on some hospital/ lunch tray" This conjunction of a profound sense of loss with the clearest-eyed observation and acceptance of the entropy of the mundane is characteristic. His poetry has a cultural breadth seldom seen in Canadian writing. He sees the pageantry of the Bayeux tapestry with the eyes of a rural quilter, whose son died beneath a tractor, who would focus on "the spear -- strayed from the main design -/ / that takes a wide-mouthed Tabourer aback,/ and recognize the pain/ of someone caught in the wreck/ of a vast, wayward machine." His lucidity and eloquence have earned the praise of such celebrated poets as Richard Howard and Richard Wilbur. But it is always the heart's music which most informs his poetic craft: and that is what keeps it true.
Minn and Jake
by Janet S. Wong Genevieve CoteA surprising friendshipDo you ever feel like you've somehow lost your true best friend? Minn feels this way. So does Jake. But Minn and Jake have no intention of being friends. Minn's a string bean. Jake's a shrimp. Minn's a girl. Jake's a boy. And in fifth grade, who wants a best friend of the opposite sex? But Minn and Jake are forced together by circumstances, which only strengthen their resistance . . . until Minn takes Jake lizard hunting. There are lots of good ways to choose a friend. This enchanting free-verse novel, accompanied by expressive, humorous black-and-white drawings, proves that sometimes friendship just happens.
Minn and Jake's Almost Terrible Summer
by Janet S. Wong Genevieve CoteThere are a few things / about your best friend that you can only learn / when you see where he's from. Minn knew / that Jake was from the city. But she didn't know / that his grandmother was Korean. That he liked taking bubble baths. / That his brother, Soup, might be an eating champion. / That Jake was a cheater, and that he had a . . . / girlfriend?! There are some things / about your best friend that it's better not / to know. Bouncing free verse and playful black-and-white illustrations combine to make this a charming follow-up to Minn and Jake. Minn and Jake's Almost Terrible Summer is a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
Minor Literature in Late Romanticism
by James NajarianThis book intervenes in the current discussion concerning so-called "minor" English literature of the late 1820s and early 1830s. Writing in the late Romantic period, this study charts the declining economic market for individual poetry volumes as other markets were developing. It examines selected authors over a short time period who consciously placed their works as minor, arguing that "minor" is not only a category that has been used to classify the literary reputation of authors long after their deaths, but a position that authors adopt themselves. Minor poets turn from long ambitious works to shorter lyrics on a limited number of subjects. They respond to the Romantic ideology and its emphasis on individual vision, achievement and reputation, but choose instead the minor. This book explores the work of Charles Lamb, as a theorist of the minor, as well as Thomas Hood, Felicia Hemans, Winthrop Mackworth Praed and Mary Mitford, as exemplars of this style. It links their work to literary Romanticism and yet responds to it in a strategically self-limited way, by posing as ancillary.
Minor Notes, Volume 1
by Tracy K. Smith Joshua Bennett Jesse McCarthyThe first volume in an anthology series that amplifies the voices of unsung Black poets to paint a more robust picture of our national past, and of the Black literary imagination, with a foreword by Tracy K. SmithA Penguin ClassicJoshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition. As Minor Notes clarifies, the work of contemporary Black poets is perhaps best understood through the lens of a long-standing tradition of the poet as witness, as prophetic voice, as communal bard, and as scholar of the everyday and the miraculous. The poets featured in Volume 1 are George Moses Horton, Fenton Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, David Wadsworth Cannon Jr., Anne Spencer, and Angelina Weld Grimké.