ENGL 2210 - Early British Literature: Paradise Lost

Presents a biography of John Milton along with critical views of his work.

This new entry in the Bloom's Classic Critical Views series looks at Milton throughout the centuries, lending a vital critical eye to this poet, and features a chronology of his life, an introduction by Professor Bloom, and an index for quick reference.

Presents concise, easy-to-understand biographical, critical, and bibliographical information and multiple sources for book reports and term papers with a wealth of information on literary works, authors, and major characters -- Digests of critical extracts prefaced by headnotes

The original Norton Critical Edition from 1975

This book re-examines scrupulously the writings and the life records of John Milton, in the context of a proper understanding of the recent developments in seventeenth-century historiography.

This book studies the interplay of theology and poetics in the three great epics of early modern England: the Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained. Christopher Bond examines the relationship between the poems' primary heroes, who are godlike, virtuous, and powerful, and the secondary heroes, who are human, fallible, and weak. He looks back at the development of this pattern of dual heroism in classical, medieval, and Italian Renaissance literature, investigates the ways in which Spenser and Milton adapted the model, and demonstrates how the Jesus of Paradise Regained can be seen as the culmination of this tradition. He proposes solutions to some of the most difficult and controversial theological cruxes posed by these poems, in particular Spenser's attitude to free will and Milton's to the Trinity.

The Tyranny of Heaven argues for a new way of reading the figure of Milton's God, contending that Milton rejects kings on earth and in heaven. Though Milton portrays God as a king in Paradise Lost, he does this neither to endorse kingship nor to recommend a monarchical model of deity. Instead, he recommends the Son, who in Paradise Regained rejects external rule as the model of politics and theology for Milton's fit audience though few. The portrait of God in Paradise Lost serves as a scathing critique of the English people and its slow but steady backsliding into the political habits of a nation long used to living under the yoke of kingship, a nation that maintained throughout its brief period of liberty the image of God as a heavenly king, and finally welcomed with open arms the return of a human king.