Abstracts of Current Articles

Matthew Allen. “‘Entertaining the Irksome Hours’: Paradise Lost 2.521–76 as the Fallen Counterpart of Milton's Curriculum in Of Education.”Peter Auksi. “‘Considerate Building’: The Scriptural Roots of Areopagitica.”Andrew T. Barnaby. “‘Reason is but choosing’: Moral Agency and the Call to Discipleship in Milton's Readie and Easie Way.”Nancy K. Barnard. “‘In Mind Prepared’: Proclaiming the Kingdom of God in Paradise Lost.”R. D. Bedford. “Irony in L ‘Allegro and Il Penseroso.”Tony Bellette. “Milton and the Baroque: A Reassessment.”Joan Heiges Blythe. “Sex‐Marked Direct Objects of Desire in Paradise Lost.”David Boocker. “Milton at Vallombrosa.”James B. Brophy. “Blake's Reinterpretation of Comus: Charity Regained.”Lana Cable. “The Politics of Decorum in Protestant Satire and Milton's Polemics.”Douglas Chambers. “Improved by Tract of Time: Art's Synopticon in Paradise Lost 12.”Alexander Chameyev and Nina Diakonova. “Byron's Manfred and Romantic Milton Worship.”Annemarie Christy. “Satan, Sin, and Death: A Paradigm of the Incestuous Family.”Thomas N. Corns, Lou Burnard, and Roy Flannagan. “Electronic Miltons, Past, Present, and To Come.”Denise Cuthbert. “Milton, Marvell and Queen Christina.”R. W. Desai. “The Human Norm in Paradise Lost: Thus measuring things in Heav‘n by things on Earth.’”Jackie Di Salvo. “Manly Reformation in Samson Agonistes.”Martin K. Doudna. “‘In Our Image’: Father and Son in Paradise Lost.”Charles W. Durham. “Satan and the Hierarchy of Hell in Paradise Lost.”Angela Esterhammer. “Words, Worlds, and Speech Acts: A Miltonic Poetics of Creation.”J. Martin Evans. “Milton's Imperial Epic.”Robert T. Fallon. “The ‘Mole’ and the ‘Lanthorn’: Milton's State Letter to Tuscany.”Ida Fasel. “The Dialectic of the Oxymoron in Paradise Lost.”Noam Flinker. “Pagan Holiday and National Conflict: A Philistine Reading of Samson Agonistes.”Claire Fowler. “The Commonwealth ‘miscalled’: Iconoclasm and Mythography in Eikonoklastes.”Coburn Freer. “A Victorian Poetic Critique of Milton.”Donald M. Friedman. “‘Sex’ in Paradise Lost.”Bryan N. S. Gooch. “Handel's L'Allegro, il Penseroso, ed il Moderato: A Reassessment.”Achsah Guibbory. “Idolatrous Images, Imitation, and True Creation in Milton's Eikonoklastes.”John K. Hale. “The Pre‐Criticism of Milton's Latin Verse, Illustrated from the Ode Ad Joannem Rousium.”R. F. Hall. “Pronouns, Tenses, and Fluidity in the Nativity Ode.”Gary D. Hamilton. “Paradise Regained and the Private Houses.”Philip Hardie. “Milton's Reading of Lucretius and the Reader in Lucretius.”J. P. Hardy. “The Tempter Foiled.”Dayton Haskin. “Choosing the Better Part with Mary and with Ruth.”Burton Hatlen. “When God Smiles: Paradise Lost 8.311–559.”Wyman H. Herendeen. “Milton's Accedence Commenc't Grammar and the Deconstruction of Grammatical Tyranny.”T. H. Howard‐Hill. “Milton and Contemporary Theatre: An Investigation of Experience and Influence.”Keith N. Hull. “Rhyme and Disorder in Samson Agonistes.”Lee M. Johnson. “Language and the Illusion of Innocence in Paradise Lost.”Motohiro Kisaichi. “Comus and the Proserpina Myth.”Thomas A. Langford. “‘That one talent which is death to hide’: The Poet as Teacher.”John Leonard. “Milton's Vow of Celibacy: A Reconsideration of the Evidence.”Walter S. H. Lim. “What Happens When God Doesn't Speak in Samson Agonistes?”Peter Lindenbaum. “The Poet in the Marketplace: Milton and Samuel Simmons.”David Loewenstein. “Paradise Lost and the Politics of Rebellion.”Bei‐Yei Loh. “Lycidas as the Manifesto of a Divinely Dedicated Scholar‐Poet and ‘Church‐outed’ Reformer.”Kristin Pruitt McColgan. “Abundant Gifts: Hierarchy and Reciprocity in Paradise Lost.”Donald Peter McDonough. “The Iconography of Milton's expulsion Scene.”Polly Mander. “The Charms of Milton's Ludlow Masque.”Catherine Gimelli Martin. “The ‘Artifice of Eternity’: The Return(s) of a Miltonic Metaphor.”Christopher Martin. “Contending with the Cyclops: Nobodies and Somebodies in the Defensio Secunda.”Michael A. Mikolajczak. “Milton's ‘Reformed’ Heaven.”Janel Mueller. “Dateline: London, May 1641. Byline: John Milton, English Republican.”Brian J. Opie. “Urania Revisited.”Ted‐Larry Pebworth. “‘Conversation with His Like’: Masculine Friendship in Paradise Lost.”G. Nageswara Rao. “Christ as ‘Poornapragna.’”David Reid. “Free Obedience and Freedom from Constraint in Paradise Lost.”Stella P. Revard. “Alpheus, Arethusa, and the Pindaric Pursuit in Lycidas.”Lawrence F. Rhu. “Milton's Change of Note: Italian Precedents for Tragedy in Eden.”David Robertson. “Soliloquy and Self‐Creation in Paradise Lost.”John P. Rumrich. “Milton Criticism and the Matter of Chaos.”Peggy Samuels. “Samson Agonistes and English Renaissance Closet Drama.”Malabika Sarkar. “Milton's Satan and the Renaissance Magus‐Astronomer.”Michael C. Schoenfeldt. “‘So Absolute She Seems’: Authority and Desire in Paradise Lost.”Paul R. Sellin. “Alexander Morus in Court: Some Insight into Milton's Polemics in Pro Se Defensio.”Hideyuki Shitaka. “The Aeneid and the Bible in Paradise Lost.”Louise Simons. “The Prairie as Eden: The Miltonic Cooper.”Ken Simpson. “The Discipline of the Word in Milton's Anti‐Episcopal Tracts.”Michael R. G. Spiller. “Directing the Audience in Samson Agonistes.”Claude J. Summers. “The (Homo)Sexual Temptation of Paradise Regained.”Margo Swiss. “Satan's Obduracy in Paradise Lost.”John S. Tanner. “Adam's Doom: Knowing Good by Evil in Milton's Eden.”Roberta White. “Milton's Presence in the Poetry of Nemerov and Berryman.”Michael Wilding. “‘Their Sex Not Equal Seem'd’: Equality in Paradise Lost.”Susanne Woods. “Milton's Poetic Authority and Early Protestant Women Poets.”

Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism – Edited by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola

'Threshold Poetics: Milton and Intersubjectivity' is a study of the challenge intersubjective experience poses to doctrinal formulations of difference. Focusing on 'Paradise Lost' and 'Samson Agonistes' and using feminist and relational psychoanalytic theory, the project examines representations of looking, working, eating, conversing, and touching, to argue that encounters between selves in 'threshold space' dismantle the binary oppositions that support categorical thinking. A key term throughout the study is recognition, defined as the capacity to tolerate both sameness and difference between separate selves. Recognition of likeness-in-difference thus undermines the exclusionary logic of patriarchal and poitical hierarchies. Both Eve and Dalila demonstrate the ability to respect the borders of the other while seeking out similarity, but where 'Paradise Lost' depicts the eventual achievements of intersubjective understanding between Adam and Eve after the fall, 'Samson Agonistes' records its failure when Samson, maintaining the boundaries of difference, refuses Dalila's effort to make contact.

Jerry Leath Mills. “Satan as Cormorant, ‘Paradise Lost’ IV, 196.”Michael Wilding. “Jonson, Sin and Milton.”Barbara K. Lewalski. “Samson Agonistes and the ‘Tragedy’ of the Apocalypse.”David M. Miller. “From Delusion to Illumination: A Larger Structure for L'Allegro ‐ II Penseroso.”Leo Miller. “Milton's State Letters: The Lunig Version.”Barbara Breasted. “Another Bewitching of Lady Alice Egerton, the Lady of ‘Comus.’”Roberts W. French. “A Note on Spenser and Milton.”Philip Darraugh Ortego. “Comus, Circe, and the Whole Bit.”Valerie Carnes. “Time and Language in Milton's Paradise Lost.” ELHVincent B. Leitch. “The Landscape of Hell in Paradise Lost, Book I.”Michael Wilding. “‘Paradise Lost’: The Parliament of Hell.”

:This essay proposes that in Samson Agonistes (1671) Milton represents Samson's development of self as a psychological process that is conditioned on Samson's capacity to change his initial Hobbesian idea of self as a spatial construct to an understanding of himself as self-constituted by acts of consciousness. Samson's process of self-constitution is, it is suggested, very similar to Locke's theory of personal identity, published twenty-three years later in the second edition of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694). Further, the connection Milton makes between personhood and freedom is strikingly similar to Locke's understanding of the way in which these terms are linked. For Milton, as for Locke, only persons can become full-fledged agents. In Samson Agonistes, Milton offers the reader an opportunity to experience the process by which Samson develops into person, his choice not to respond to divine call, and, consequently, his failure to become a free agent. In Milton's representation, Samson's failure to achieve free agency results in a violent act that destroys both the Philistines and himself.

John Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are among the most profound epic poems in the English literary canon. Paradise Lost recounts the dramatic and compelling story of humanity's fall from grace a narrative filled with rebellion, betrayal, and the battle between innocence and corruption. This epic depicts an intense struggle between God and Satan for control over humanity’s fate, spanning the realms of Heaven, Hell, and Earth. Central to this conflict are Adam and Eve, whose susceptibility to temptation lies at the heart of mankind's downfall, orchestrated by Satan and his band of rebel angels. Published in 1667, Paradise Lost vividly portrays Satan’s defiance, his expulsion from Heaven, and his cunning role in leading Adam and Eve into sin, thereby causing their exile from Eden. Its sequel, Paradise Regained (1671), shifts focus to Christ’s unwavering resolve during Satan’s efforts to tempt Him in the wilderness. Where the former epic depicts humanity's fall through disobedience, the latter celebrates redemption by highlighting Christ’s triumphant resistance. Together, the two works present a striking contrast while Paradise Lost illustrates the origin of sin; Paradise Regained reveals the victory over it through steadfast faith and moral fortitude in the face of temptations like lust, pride, and power. These epics aim to assert “Eternal Providence” and illuminate the divine purpose by justifying “the ways of God to men.” In Paradise Lost, Milton narrates the descent of Satan and his followers into Hell’s inferno, Satan’s subsequent escape to Eden’s untainted beauty, and his insidious manipulation of Eve, which ultimately leads to Adam’s choice to share in her fate. Yet even amid humanity’s tragic fall, there remains a promise of redemption. In Paradise Regained, Milton explores Satan’s attempts to undermine Jesus’ mission by tempting Him with worldly power, culminating in a greater triumph as Christ emerges victorious. Together, these epics celebrate the Son as a resplendent hero the ultimate conqueror over sin and death, who reconciles mankind with God. Read as a cohesive narrative, these masterpieces not only exalt the Son’s glory but also provide profound reflections on faith, temptation, and salvation.

Spenserian MomentsGordonTeskey Cambridge, <scp>MA</scp>: Harvard <scp>UP</scp>, 2019. 552 pp. <scp>ISBN</scp> 13: 9780674988446. $47.00 (cloth).

The paper aims to explore how the opposing thrones between God and Satan spread out in dreams in John Milton's Paradise Lost. Dreams regarded as fields for Satan to induce Eve make Satan temporarily win the battle; however, God turns the tables with little effort to subjugate Satan by appearing in Adam and Eve's dreams. In Milton's elaboration of Paradise Lost, God the father, the incarnation of morality represents supreme power in universe. Howbeit, Satan not only embraces the image of the representative of evilness but plays the embodiment of the root of human crime. Due to the hatred out of jealously, dissemination with malevolent rumor against God becomes Satan's measure to persuade falling angels that they should possess equal status with God instead of being inferior to God. Furthermore, Satan incarnates himself as animals to induce Eve to rebel against doctrines and orders made by God. Impressively, images of evilness and goodness both appear in Eve and Adam's dreams reflecting the tug of war between justice and injustice. Dreams symbolize the space of the universe containing positive and negative power. Disregarding the influence of biblical works and other relevant elements in accord with Milton's imagination, the issue of the opposed thrones between God and Satan plays a pivotal role in enriching the epic.

Ethics, Individualism, and Class in John Webster's The White Devil Andrew Strycharski (bio) One of Kathleen McLuskie's more disturbing judgments in her influential feminist account of Shakespearean criticism was that the pleasures afforded by great art might be bad for you.1 That such an ethical problematic remains unsettled was witnessed in recent scuffles over the status of religious violence in Milton's Samson Agonistes. John Carey, in a widely read Times Literary Supplement piece characterizing Stanley Fish's work on the play as an apology for terrorism, insisted that, as a great and subtle work of literature, Milton's closet drama of course humanely criticizes Samson's suicidal violence; Feisal Mohamed, taking issue with this logic in an award-winning PMLA essay, recognized that Samson Agonistes could be both a great work of art and complicit in a history of Western violence.2 I raise this problematic to introduce John Webster's disturbingly violent The White Devil (1612) because few early-modern plays so relentlessly portray moral debasement without providing any effective ethical guideposts. What is the ethical status of the pleasures twenty-first-century readers might take in such a morally bankrupt Jacobean tragedy? How might this play's ethical value, or lack thereof, be understood with reference to a history that has not merely passed, but, as Mohamed might insist, is our past? Without ignoring moral or ethical issues, recent scholarship on The White Devil has tended to focus on acute, local questions, whether historical or performance related, rather than the moral questions that previous critics found imperative.3 Grand moral evaluations in the style of George Bernard Shaw, who condemned the play for having "no ray of noble feeling, no touch of faith, beauty or even common kindness . . . from beginning to end," hardly seem germane to late-modern criticism.4 The main exception to this tendency has been the work of feminist critics, such as Catherine Belsey, who have often presented an ethically based criticism of the play's treatment of its "radically discontinuous" heroine, Vittoria.5 [End Page 291] Perhaps a reason more recent critics have shied away from addressing the ethical morass in which The White Devil is mired, and the resulting imperative to judge Webster's play, is the tendency to assume a universal humanism underwriting such judgments. Even Belsey's powerful reading is underpinned by the commonsensical idea that, however much the individual is an historical construction, access to the unified, coherent "I" of the universal liberal subject was a source of power in practice denied to women.6 The following reading seeks to reengage fundamental ethical questions and to do so from the vantage Belsey has opened of how the play represents subjects. In reopening these ethical questions, I find it useful to approach them not from a standpoint of universal moral principles, but rather from the standpoint of subject formation or, following phenomenology, being. This essay sets ontology in relation to historicism by focusing on intersections of class friction, ethical being, and emergent individualist ideology. In terms of representing the subject, the ethics of Webster's play are inseparable from its representation of the social formation of the early-modern court. The relations between theory and history—complex, imperfect, confusing—must be wrestled with, not as a relation of the universal or abstract to the particular or concrete, but to prevent precisely such slippage, which would begin to make of Theory another in a long line of immanent subjects (History, Science, the Individual). As this language invoking relations and immanent subjects may indicate, lingering in the background of this effort is Jean-Luc Nancy's formulation of a nonessential relationality as the defining characteristic of being in "The Inoperative Community," a formulation that locates ethics at the heart of ontology.7 Although in what follows I will lean heavily on Jean-Paul Sartre's analysis of concrete relations with others from Being and Nothingness (1956), I do so from the critical vantage on Sartrean individualism afforded by Nancy's dissection of individualism's insoluble contradictions—contradictions that leave their mark on Sartre's own distressing account of all interpersonal relations as at heart a form of conflict growing...

Reviewed by: Privacy in the Age of Shakespeare by Ronald Huebert Frank Swannack Huebert, Ronald, Privacy in the Age of Shakespeare, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2016; cloth; pp. 352; 11 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. CA $65.00; ISBN 9781442647916. Ronald Huebert begins the introduction with Sir John Harington's The Prayse of Private Life. He argues Harington's prose treatise reveals that privacy has renewed importance in 'the age of Shakespeare', which he defines as the period 1516–1667 (p. 4). This range refers to Sir Thomas More's challenge to privacy in Utopia, and John Milton's spiritual privacy in Paradise Lost. In Chapter 1, Huebert investigates what privacy means to Shakespeare. In Hamlet, Huebert finds a dichotomy between private and public spaces. He examines the invasion of private thoughts through overhearing Hamlet's soliloquies, and of space such as Ophelia's closet. In Twelfth Night, Huebert analyses the anxiety of misinterpreting the inner self, in particular, Olivia's veil and Malvolio's attempt to protect his privacy from Feste, Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Chapter 2 charts a spiritual interiority for both Protestants and Catholics. Huebert examines the prayer closet to argue that the dichotomies of 'Protestant and Catholic, male and female, body and soul' are dissolved(p. 61). He shows this through a close analysis of Christ's agony in the garden, and the spiritual allegory positing Christian souls as Christ's bride. The chapter ends with an investigation of John Saltmarsh's private devotions. Saltmarsh privileges the soul to the point where his flesh is superfluous to private spiritual needs. Chapter 3 focuses on voyeurism. Through the story of Diana and Actaeon in Ovid's Metamorphoses and the History of Susanna in the Apocrypha, Huebert demonstrates how the male voyeur's intrusion of female privacy ends in his death. After examining poetic striptease, Huebert delivers an inspired reading of Much Ado About Nothing. He argues persuasively that Claudio is a voyeur through the way he observes and discusses Hero. Huebert reads Beatrice's passionate command to Benedick to kill Claudio as following the same pattern. Chapter 4 has an experimental, even voyeuristic, tone as Huebert analyses commonplace books. His fascinating rationale is that texts in manuscript form reveal more of the private self than their published counterparts. These less well known works capture a sense of undisturbed private thoughts, as they are not shaped by a history of critical reading in the public domain. With Chapter 5, Huebert investigates whether early modern men and women share a similar understanding of privacy. Lady Anne Clifford's diary reveals a woman who endured a privacy of isolation. Her husband is frequently absent and, when at home, he often retreats into his private study. In contrast to her husband, Clifford's reading of literature and needlework are constantly monitored and interrupted. In a diary by John Ramsey, he is always on the [End Page 217] move and rarely with his family. He only mentions one of his eight children. Huebert concludes that early modern women occupy a shadowy exposed privacy, while men enjoy travelling and private meditative retreats. Chapter 6 examines utopic privacy. In More's Utopia, Huebert discovers an exposed society where privacy is seen as encouraging abusive practices. He then examines Adam and Eve's bower in Milton's Paradise Lost. The Garden of Eden allows intimate privacy for a sexual relationship free from the sin of voyeurism. Chapter 7 investigates if privacy protected early modern heterodoxy. Christopher Marlowe's Edward II reveals the king's desire for privacy to spend time alone with Piers Gaveston. Huebert then examines how Galileo's discovery of a heliocentric universe led to enforced privacy. John Donne's Roman Catholic background and public position as Anglican priest are scrutinized. His poetry published posthumously reveals he considered God's love universal, not subject to affiliation. Huebert establishes that early modern privacy meant cooperating superficially with authority through textual ambiguity. Chapter 8 examines privacy in Andrew Marvell's poetry and prose. Huebert argues that Marvell needed privacy for his dubious erotic tastes, though he finds complexity in Marvell's poetry he terms 'the grammar of supposition and surmise...

Samson the Judge: Religion and Violence in Milton's SAMSON AGONISTES

What are literary genres? How can they be at once highly general—accommodating an indefinite number of individual works—and historically specific, emerging only in particular cultures at particular times? This chapter argues that scholars of literature can better contend with these questions using conceptual tools from recent work in linguistics. Specifically, it suggests that cognitive and construction linguistics offers a plausible account of genres as linguistic signs, an account that can help to make sense of both formal and historical considerations. The test case is John Milton’s Samson Agonistes: a 1671 English drama which recasts the Hebrew biblical narrative of Samson as a tragedy on the Greek model. The paratactic form of this play has long exercised critics: Samuel Johnson famously described Samson as missing an Aristotelian “middle.” After outlining some basic elements of construction grammar, the chapter shows that such a unified approach to both syntax and literary genre can help explain Samson’s formal innovations in terms of the generic and linguistic competence of contemporary readers. The chapter argues that literary works are like utterances: both instantiate abstract signs (conventionalized pairings of form and meaning) that people learn as part of their larger repertoire of linguistic signs. The signs that constitute genre are especially big and abstract; nevertheless, the interpretation of Samson’s paratactic form, as the history of Milton criticism shows, involves the same kinds of categorizing judgments as interpreting paratactic utterances. The semiotic approach to genre championed by the chapter makes explicit the kinds of communal, historically contingent category judgements that are regularly carried out by literary scholars and common readers alike. Recognizing that we perform the same sorts of judgments to understand a sentence and a literary work—albeit at different scales, degrees of complexity, and levels of abstraction—can allow scholars in literary and cultural studies to give more fully historicist accounts of how genres originate in everyday speech acts and undergo subsequent developments in both form and meaning. And in a larger view that embraces both linguistic and literary theory, regarding genres as signs provides a plausibly unified account of categorization across scales: one that extends from the morpheme, the word, the phrase, and the sentence to genre and other large—scale discourse categories.

Abstract: Sitting might be associated in our minds with a break in action; less a gesture than a slump into inertia. However, by analyzing John Milton's Samson Agonistes (1671), John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1614), and texts on melancholy and Hercules's attack on the Pygmies, we argue that manifold ideas about madness and melancholy are encapsulated in the early modern sitting body. Hercules, Samson, and the Duchess are explicitly written—or can be read—as mad and melancholy. Like Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer's depictions of Melancholia, these characters are seen in a sitting posture. By sitting decisively, the Duchess and Samson alert us to their early modern context which is rife with visual and textual depictions of sitting. Thereby, they invite us to read their sitting bodies as sites where madness and rationality, power and dependency, and different genders, incline into and towards each other.

1. Controversial merriment 2. Milton reads Spenser's May Eclogue 3. Satan and the demonic conclave 4. Milton's den of error 5. The paradise of fools 6. Laughter in heaven 7. Miltonic transubstantiation 8. Idolatry in Eden 9. Images of both churches Conclusion Appendix: Transcriptions from satirical broadsheets.

ABSTRACTS