The Miltonic MomentUniversity Press of Kentucky, 2021. dec. 14. - 176 oldal Milton's poems invariably depict the decisive instant in a story, a moment of crisis that takes place just before the action undergoes a dramatic change of course. Such instants look backward to a past that is about to be superseded or repudiated and forward, at the same time, to a future that will immediately begin to unfold. Martin Evans identifies this moment of transition as "the Miltonic Moment." This provocative new study focuses primarily on three of Milton's best known early poems: "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," "A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus)," and "Lycidas." These texts share a distinctive perceptual and cognitive structure, which Evans defines as characteristically Miltonic, embracing a single moment that is both ending and beginning. The poems communicate a profound sense of intermediacy because they seem to take place between the boundaries that separate events. The works illuniated here, which also include Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained, are all about transition from one form to another: from paganism to Christianity, from youthful inexperience to moral maturity, and from pastoral retirement to heroic engagement. This transformation is often ideological as well as historical or biographical. Evans shows that the moment of transition is characteristic of all Milton's poetry, and he proposes a new way of reading one of the seminal writers of the seventeenth century. Evans concludes that the narrative reversals in Milton's poetry suggest his constant attempts to bring about an intellectual revolution that, at a time of religious and political change in England, would transform an age. |
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... earlier drafts of several chapters. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers for Kentucky University Press who made many useful suggestions, and to my research assistant, G. E. Light, who helped me prepare an earlier version of the ...
... earlier incidents in the history of Cambridge University or the life of Edward King but rather to the literary biography of the poem's author: “Yet once more, 0 ye laurels, and once more / Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never sere, / I come ...
... of millenarian publications took place in the early 1640s in the wake of the Puritan revolution, but the movement as a whole had its roots much earlier in the century.8 Indeed, ever since the late 1500s scholars and theologians.
... earlier seers (the Sibyl of Cumae in the Eclogue and the “holy sages” (5) of the Old Testament in the Ode); both portray the descent of a virgin goddess (Astraea in the Eclogue and the biblical virtue of justice and her sisters in the ...
... earlier, but also purges the scene of any entity that might possibly contaminate the sanctity of the occasion. The site of the reader's encounter with the savior, one might say, has been comprehensively sterilized. The literary ...