Review
"A demanding, ambitious, and surprisingly Blakean thesis....Newlyn's study significantly revalues our understanding of the Romantics' complex interactions with Milton, and it proves itself essential reading for students of Romanticism, Renaissance tradition, and the dynamics of poetic relations."--Keats Shelley Journal
"Ambitious and impressive new book....Newlyn consistently offers original and often fascinating readings of romantic texts."--Studies in Romanticism
"There have been numerous books and articles on the subject, but Lucy Newlyn's is certainly the best....Newlyn's principl argument is simple, beautifully articulated, amply supported through close analysis and wholly convincing. The structure is as elegant as the argument."--Review of English studies
Product Description
Was Milton on the side of the angels or the devils? Was he republican or anti-republican, feminist or misogynist? Did he value innocence or experience? Lucy Newlyn shows how the Romantic reader responds, in complex and often paradoxical ways, to multiple ambiguities inherent in the very language of Paradise Lost. She examines ambivalent allusions to Satan and God, in responses to the French Revolution (Coleridge and Wordsworth), in studies of the origin of evil (Godwin, Blake, the Shelleys), in accounts of the creative imagination; and looks at how Eve pervades representations of female sexuality (Byron and Keats). The book culminates in a chapter on Blake's Milton, and prose writers such as De Quincey, Lamb, Wollstonecraft, and Hazlitt are also considered. Milton emerges as a poet of indeterminacy, not an authority figure, whose concern with the problematic issues of revolution and religion, sexuality and selfhood, make his writing relevant and accessible.
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