Milton and the poetics of freedom
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Milton and the poetics of freedom
(Medieval and Renaissance literary studies)
Duquesne University Press, c2013
- : cloth
Available at 1 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-276) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In our contemporary Western culture, freedom is a powerful term with elastic meanings and contradictory uses; it has both driven rebellion and justified empire. John Miltons world, like our own, struggled to understand freedom within what was already considered a heritage of political and personal liberty, compounded in the seventeenth century by theological questions of freedom. In this important new study, Susanne Woods reveals Miltons central place in the evolution both of ideas of freedom in English-speaking culture and in creating a poetics that invites readers to enact the freedom Milton defines. For Milton, we find, freedom is fundamentally about human choice; God gave humankind genuine free will, with reason and the light of conscience to enable choice. True freedom comes from who one is, formed and asserted by the choices one makes. This is true for the reader as well as for the author, Milton believed, and the result is what Woods terms an "invitational poetics". By locating freedom in thoughtful choice, in other words, Milton must offer his reader opportunities to consider alternatives, even to his own well-argued positions.
In six chapters, Woods examines these invitational poetics on several levels: as they develop in Miltons prose and early poetry, in theory as well as practice; as they are expressed within prose sentences and lines of poetry through choices of diction and syntax; and as they inform character, plot, and genre. Chapter 1 connects Miltons most famous statement about his ongoing interest in liberty with debates that preceded him. Chapter 2 shows Miltons Elizabethan predecessors grappling with the possibilities and limits of poetic indirection; Philip Sidney, in particular, provides an under-appreciated rhetorical and theoretical foundation on which Miltons invitational poetics could build. These background chapters allow us to see Miltons evolution toward a poetics of choice, followed by their confident manifestation in the great poems. Later chapters consider Paradise Lost as Miltons grand disquisition on knowledge, choice, and freedom; and Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes in relation to the ambiguities of choice and vocation.
Finally, Milton is situated in relation to the most influential seventeenth century political thinkers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and Woods examines the influence of Areopagitica on political culture since Miltons time, placing Miltons ideas in a tradition that leads to modern contestations of freedom.
by "Nielsen BookData"