ABSTRACTS

The following abstracts are from essays in Milton Studies 25 (1989), ed. James D. Simmonds. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1990.Stephen C. Behrendt. “Paradise Lost, History Painting, and Eighteenth‐Century English Nationalism.”Lloyd F. Dickson. “Against the Wiles of the Devil: Carlotta Petrina's Christocentric Illustrations of Paradise Lost.” 161–90.Steven C. Dillon. “Milton and the Poetics of Extremism.” 265–83.M. J. Doherty. “Salvation History, Poetic Form, and the Logic of Time in Milton's Nativity Ode.” 21–42.J. Karl Franson. “The Fatal Voyage of Edward King, Milton's Lycidas.” 43–67.John K. Hale. “Milton Playing with Ovid.” 3–19.Elizabeth Hanson. “To Smite Once and Yet Once More: The Transaction of Milton's Lycidas.” 69–88.Michael Lieb. “Reading God: Milton and the Anthropopathetic Tradition.” 213–43.Shirley Sharon‐Zisser. “Silence and Darkness in Paradise Lost.” 191–211.Keith W. F. Stavely. “Satan and Arminianism in Paradise Lost.” 125–39.Julia M. Walker. “Milton and Galileo: The Art of Intellectual Canonization.” 109–23.William Walker. “Typology and Paradise Lost, Books XI and XII.” 245–64.Robert Wiltenburg. “Damnation in a Roman Dress: Catiline, Catiline, and Paradise Lost.” 89–108.

Heather Asals. “Echo, Narcissus, and Ambiguity, in Lycidas.”Gordon Campbell. “Milton's Theological and Literary Treatments of the Creation.”Eugene R. Cunnar. “Milton's Two‐Handed Engine: the Visionary Iconography of Christus in Statera.”Huston Diehl. “Teaching Milton's Early Poetry.”Albert C. Labriola. “‘Thy Humiliation Shall Exalt’: The Christology of Paradise Lost.”Mary Ann McGuire. “Milton's Arcades and the Entertainment Tradition.”John Mulryan. “Milton's Lycidas and the Italian Mythographers: Some Suggestive Parallels in their Treatment of Mythological Subjects.”Jason P. Rosenblatt. “The Angel and the Shepherd in Lycidas.”Raymond Waddington. “Here Comes the Son: Providential Theme and Symbolic Pattern in Paradise Lost, Book III.”Anthony Yu. “Life in the Garden: Primal Innocence and the Image of God in Paradise Lost.”

IT HAS OFTEN been stated, or assumed, that Milton's Lycidas relies most heavily on Christian modes of consolation to produce response that it seeks to evoke. A corollary to this belief that conventions of pastoral elegy observed throughout poem are in large part not functional but merely ornamental. Such a typical attitude toward Lycidas held by D. C. Allen, who, in course of a useful study of place of poem in history of contaminatio of pagan and Christian topoi in mode of paramythia, observes that Lycidas is so totally different from other elegies of Renaissance and antiquity that were it not for sheer externalities of mode, such as mourning of nature, summoning of deities, accidental literary recollections-the impediments that glossators so meticulously recorded-it would hardly seem to belong to same artistic gender.' Allen sees essence of Lycidas in the clear and fresh ordering of Christian cliches (p. 69). A few scholars, however, emphasized function of traditional, non-Christian elements that Milton took over from long succession of earlier pastoralists. For instance, R. P. Adams notes that classical and postclassical poets have made additions and modifications, but continuity of traditional form remains unbroken.2 Although it would be foolish to argue that man who later composed Paradise Lost was not sincere in his expression of Christian