Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost

Couverture
Cambridge University Press, 22 juin 2000 - 227 pages
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.
 

Pages sélectionnées

Table des matières

Controversial merriment
xvii
Milton reads Spensers May Eclogue
19
Satan and the demonic conclave
40
Miltons Den of Error
65
The Paradise of Fools
85
Laughter in heaven
105
Miltonic transubstantiation
129
Idolatry in Eden
149
The image of both churches
163
Conclusion
185
transcriptions from satirical broadsheets
192
Select Bibliography
202
Index
218
Droits d'auteur

Expressions et termes fréquents

Informations bibliographiques