JOHN MILTON
John Milton by Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Dates: 1608-1674
Nationality: British
Literary Periods:
Commonwealth Interregnum Period, 1642-1660
Jacobean and Caroline Period, 1603-1660
Neoclassical Period, 1660-1785
Renaissance Period, 1500-1660
Restoration Period, 1660-1700
RELATED AUTHORS
- Dante Alighieri
- John Donne
- John Dryden
- William Shakespeare
- Edmund Spenser
SPACE
Depict of Satan, Gustave Doré, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
REFERENCE & BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Scribner Writers Series [Database]
Essays on the life and works of John Milton, complete works and suggested reading bibliographies
You'll also want to check out...
- Literature Resource Center [DATABASE]Includes entries from Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors, Twayne's Authors Series, and Scribner Writers Series
- Literature Online (LION)Biographical overview, complete bibliography, journal articles, audio & video recordings, and recommended Web sites
RESEARCH & CRITICISM
Books, essays, and journal articles indexed in MLA International Bibliography 
[Database]
MLA International Bibliography is the definitive literary research database, indexing the most authoritative Milton scholarship published in books and academic journals. MLA indexes and links to the entire JSTOR literary research collection as well as linking to many other full-text providers and the Colby College Libraries catalog. If you discover books or articles through MLA that are not available at Colby or through our lending partners, please request these items using your ILLiad Account.
You'll also want to check out...
The Cambridge Introduction to Milton (2012) by
John Milton is one of the most important and influential writers in English literary history. The goal of this book is to make Milton's works more accessible and enjoyable by providing a comprehensive overview of the author's life, times and writings. It describes essential details from Milton's biography, explains some of the cultural and historical contexts in which he wrote, offers fresh analyses of his major pamphlets and poems - including Lycidas, Areopagitica and Paradise Lost - and describes in depth traditional and recent responses to his reputation and writings. Separate sections focus on important concepts or key passages from his major works to illustrate how readers can interpret - and get excited about - Milton's writings. This detailed and engaging introduction to Milton will help readers not only better understand the author's life and works but also better appreciate why Milton matters.
Call Number: Miller PR3588 .D53 2012ISBN: 9780521898188
Milton and the Art of Rhetoric (2012) by
Challenging the conventional view of John Milton as an iconoclast who spoke only to a 'fit audience though few', Daniel Shore argues that Milton was a far more pragmatic writer than previous scholarship has recognized. Summoning evidence from nearly all of his works - poetry and prose alike - Shore asserts that Milton distanced himself from the prescriptions of classical rhetoric to develop new means of persuasion suited to an age distrustful of traditional eloquence. Shore demonstrates that Milton's renunciation of agency, audience, purpose and effect in the prose tracts leads not to quietism or withdrawal, but rather to a reasserted investment in public debate. Shore reveals a writer who is committed to persuasion and yet profoundly critical of his own persuasive strategies. An innovative contribution to the field, this text will appeal to scholars of Milton, seventeenth-century literature, Renaissance literature and the history and theory of rhetoric.
Call Number: E-BookISBN: 9781107021501
Milton's Messiah: the son of God in the works of John Milton (2011) by
Milton's Messiah provides the first comprehensive book-length analysis of the nature and significance of the Son of God in Milton's poetry and theology. The book engages with Biblical and Patristic theology, Reformation and post-Reformation thought, and the original Latin of the treatise De Doctrina Christiana, to argue for a radical reassessment of Milton's doctrine of the atonement and its importance for understanding Milton's poetics. In the footsteps of Dennis Danielson's Milton's Good God, this study responds to William Empson's celebrated portrayal of Milton's God as a deity invoking dread and awe, and instead locates the ultimately affirming presence of mercy, grace, and charity in Milton's epic vision. Challenging the attribution of an Arian or Socinian model to Milton's conception of the Son, this interdisciplinary interpretation marshals theological, philological, philosophical, and literary-critical methods to establish, for the first time, not only the centrality of the Son and his salvific office for Milton's oeuvre, but also the variety of ways in which the Son's restorative influence is mediated through the scenes, characters, actions, and utterances of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain'd. From the allegorical sites Satan encounters as he voyages through the cosmos, to Eve's first taste of the Forbidden Fruit, to the incarnate Son's perilous situation poised atop the Temple pinnacle, Hillier illustrates how a redemptive poetics upholds Milton's proclaimed purpose to assert eternal providence and justify God's ways. This original study should court debate and controversy alike over Milton's priorities as a poet and a religious thinker.
Call Number: E-BookISBN: 0199591881
Milton and the Post-Secular Present (2011) by
Our 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.
Call Number: Miller PR3588 .M57 2011ISBN: 9780804776509
PRIMARY SOURCES: TEXTS
John Milton, Paradise Lost (2011) by
John Milton (1608-1674) was arguably one of the best-read persons of his epoch. Miltonâ¿¿s commonplace book reveals that in addition to the thoroughly humanistic education that he received at Trinity College Cambridge (1625-1632), he also conducted an extensively broad reading program of his own immediately after concluding his university studies which included forays into nearly every branch of learning in a period that he affectionately referred to as his â¿¿studious
retirementâ¿¿ (1632-38).
For over 400 years, many literary critics have declared this monumental work, Paradise Lost, to be the greatest poem in the English language. Dr. Stallard contends that a full understanding of the Bible as the poemâ¿¿s primary inter-text is essential to appreciating the poem in its Puritan context. John Miltonâ¿¿s Bible is lavishly annotated with Biblical references that demonstrates that Milton was
mining a wide variety of translations including the 1540 Great Bible, the 1560 Geneva Bible, the Bishops Bible of 1568, the Douay-Rheims of 1582, and the revised Authorized Version of 1612. This Biblically annotated edition of Paradise Lost will be useful to all scholars and students of Milton alike. That a lack of familiarity with the Bible should discourage students of English literature from reading the pinnacle achievement of one of the finest poets and minds in the English language is both sad and avoidable. This edition makes Milton more accessible, comprehensible, and
enjoyable for everyone.
Call Number: Miller PR3560.A2 S73 2011ISBN: 9780881462364
The Divorce Tracts of John Milton (2010) by
Both in content and in method, Milton's divorce tracts are important for the questions we ask of the past in order to address urgent issues of the present. Milton's argument that divorce could be "to the good of both sexes" makes this often intimidating writer and his era accessible and compelling to contemporary readers. His claim for divorce on the basis of mutual incompatibility established the groundwork for the justification of divorce in late twentieth century Anglo-American law. Milton's rhetorical methods from cogent advocacy to speculative commentary and poignant vignettes, from citation of authorities and carefully reasoned biblical exegesis to defensive vituperation demonstrate the range of debate in seventeenth century pamphlet warfare that endures in the media of modern culture.
Call Number: Miller PR3569 .V36 2010ISBN: 9780820704401
Complete prose works of John Milton by Call Number: Colby PR3569 .W6 v.1 - v. 8
