Although Milton wrote several poems and sonnets in his earlier career, he became known as a revolutionary and passionate political activist, beginning his political career with the pamphlets that he wrote on the current politics of his time, defending antimonarchical rule and republicanism, giving particular attention to the religious and civil liberties of the people and the necessity of a free commonwealth. However, following the restoration of monarchy, he had to stop writing political pamphlets because, as a republican and defender of regicide, Milton was in danger, and the new regime made it impossible for him to express his political thoughts safely. He embarked on a literary project which included his major poetical works, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. Considering his earlier reputation as an ardent republican, leading an active political life, it can be stated that Milton could not detach himself from the political controversies of his time. Hence, he wrote Paradise Lost as a political poem in which he reflected and inserted his political views in an allegorical manner. This book re-reads Milton’s Paradise Lost in the light of his political views as reflected in his earlier political pamphlets. It argues that, using literature as a medium of expression, Milton intentionally wrote Paradise Lost as a political poem, in which, by re-writing the Biblical story of the Creation, the fall of Satan and the fall of Adam and Eve, he created a political subtext which reflected the social and political panorama of England of his time.

Religious satire and polemic constitute an elusive presence in Paradise Lost. John N. King shows how Milton's poem takes on new meaning when understood as part of a strategy of protest against ecclesiastical formalism and clericalism. The experience of Adam and Eve before the Fall recalls many Puritan devotional habits. After the Fall, they are prone to 'idolatrous' ritual and ceremony that anticipate the religious 'error' of Milton's own age. Vituperative sermons, broadsides and pamphlets, notably Milton's own tracts, afford a valuable context for recovering the poem's engagement with the violent history of the Civil Wars, Commonwealth and Restoration, while contemporary visual satires help to clarify Miltonic practice. Eighteenth-century critics who attacked breaches of decorum and sublimity in Paradise Lost alternately deplored and ignored a literary and polemical tradition deployed by Milton's contemporaries. This important study, first published in 2000, sheds light on Milton's epic and its literary and religious contexts.

In a reexamination of the allegorical dimensions of PARADISE LOST, Catherine Martin presents Milton's poem as a prophecy foretelling the end of one culture and its replacement by another. Maintaining a dialogue with a critical tradition that extends from Johnson and Coleridge to the best contemporary Milton scholarship, Martin sets PARADISE LOST in both the early modern and the postmodern worlds.

Composed after the collapse of his political hopes, Milton's great poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes are an effort to understand what it means to be a poet on the threshold of a post-theological world. The argument of Delirious Milton, inspired in part by the architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York, is that Milton's creative power is drawn from a rift at the center of his consciousness over the question of creation itself. This rift forces the poet to oscillate deliriously between two incompatible perspectives, at once affirming and denying the presence of spirit in what he creates. From one perspective the act of creation is centered in God and the purpose of art is to imitate and praise the Creator. From the other perspective the act of creation is centered in the human, in the built environment of the modern world. The oscillation itself, continually affirming and negating the presence of spirit, of a force beyond the human, is what Gordon Teskey means by delirium. He concludes that the modern artist, far from being characterized by what Benjamin (after Baudelaire) called "loss of the aura," is invested, as never before, with a shamanistic spiritual power that is mediated through art.

div What does eating have to do with aesthetic taste? While most accounts of aesthetic history avoid the gustatory aspects of taste, this book rewrites standard history to uncover the constitutive and dramatic tension between appetite and aesthetics at the heart of British literary tradition. From Milton through the Romantics, the metaphor of taste serves to mediate aesthetic judgment and consumerism, gusto and snobbery, gastronomes and gluttons, vampires and vegetarians, as well as the philosophy and physiology of food. The author advances a theory of taste based on Milton’s model of the human as consumer (and digester) of food, words, and other commodities—a consumer whose tasteful, subliminal self remains haunted by its own corporeality. Radically rereading Wordsworth’s feeding mind, Lamb’s gastronomical essays, Byron’s cannibals and other deviant diners, and Kantian nausea, Taste resituates Romanticism as a period that naturally saw the rise of the restaurant and the pleasures of the table as a cultural field for the practice of aesthetics. /DIV

John Milton put a twist on the story of Adam and Eve--in the process he created what some have called one of the greatest literary works in the English Language. It has inspired music, art, film, and even video games. But it's hundreds of years old and reading it today sometimes is a little tough. BookCaps is here to help! BookCaps puts a fresh spin on Milton’s classic by using language modern readers won't struggle to make sense of. The original English text is also presented in the book, along with a comparable version of both text. We all need refreshers every now and then. Whether you are a student trying to cram for that big final, or someone just trying to understand a book more, BookCapsTM can help. We are a small, but growing company, and are adding titles every month.