Browsing by Subject "Milton"
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Item Conversation and the polemic style of life : toleration and print culture in Revolutionary England(2020-08-17) Garner, James Donathan; Longaker, Mark Garrett, 1974-; Rumrich, John Peter, 1954-; Roberts-Miller, Patricia; Remer, GaryThough the fields of history, literature, and political theory have had much to say about the tolerationist debates of the 1640s, this fraught period has gone woefully underexamined by historians of rhetoric. Coupling rhetorical analysis with current scholarship on early modern toleration, Conversation and the Polemic Style of Life examines three tolerationist writers’ rhetorical strategies against the intellectual backdrop of their conversational habits and attitudes toward discussion. Across its four chapters, Conversation and the Polemic Style of Life develops the notion of a conversational rhetorical stance from which authors wrote in order to expand the limits of toleration. The first chapter establishes the relevant historical context and surveys a range of Protestant and Puritan pamphlets of the 1630s and 40s to establish conversation as a matter of character and to articulate several features of conversation in the period as they were translated into writing. The second chapter contends that learned conversation informs the poet John Milton’s development of a familiar style throughout his writings on toleration as he seeks to defend learned intellectuals from public scorn. Chapter three turns to the writings of the Leveller leader and merchant William Walwyn to uncover how his penchant for charitable conversation both informs and conflicts with his use of the rhetorical figure prosopopoeia as he defends the sectaries from persecution. In the final chapter, the chaplains of the New Model Army take on their critics’ frenzied polemical attacks by appealing to virtues echoing sermo in order to defend their soldiers’ blameless conversation. In addition to making scholarly interventions pertinent to its three main case studies, this project’s four chapters offer fresh engagements with rhetorical theory and toleration studies. The project calls for toleration studies to attend more closely to the analytical technologies afforded by rhetorical theory. It furthermore suggests that rhetorical theorists and historians of rhetoric have much to gain from studying the knotty toleration controversies of the 1640s. Finally, it argues that if we think outside of the classical rhetorical frame, we can deepen our understandings of how irenic forms of rhetoric struggle and evolve in times of political turmoil.Item "King hereafter" : Macbeth and apocalypse in the Stuart discourse of sovereignty(2010-05) Foran, Gregory Augustine; Rumrich, John Peter, 1954-; Whigham, Frank F.; Mallin, Eric S.; Ng, Su Fang; Levack, Brian P.“‘King Hereafter’” posits Shakespearean theater as a gateway between Reformation England’s suppressed desire to rid itself of monarchy and that desire’s expression in the 1649 execution of King Charles I. Specifically, I argue that Macbeth darkly manifests a latent Protestant fantasy in which the kings of the earth are toppled in a millenarian coup. Revolution- and Restoration-era writers John Milton and William Davenant attempt to liberate or further repress Macbeth’s apocalyptic republicanism when they invoke the play for their respective causes. Shakespeare’s text resists appropriation, however, pointing up the blind spots in whatever form of sovereignty it is enlisted to support. I first analyze Macbeth (1606) in its original historical context to show how it offers an immanent critique of James I’s prophetic persona. Macbeth’s tragic foreknowledge of his own supersession by Banquo’s heirs mirrors James’s paradoxical effort to ground his kingship on apocalyptic promises of the demise of earthly sovereignty. Shakespeare’s regicidal fantasy would be largely repressed into the English political unconscious during the pre-war years, until John Milton drew out the play’s antimonarchical subtext in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649). Yet the specter of an undead King Charles, I argue in chapter two, haunts Milton just as Banquo’s ghost vexes Macbeth because Milton’s populist theory of legitimate rule continues to define sovereignty as the right to arbitrary violence. In chapter three, I show how Sir William Davenant’s Restoration revision of Macbeth (c.1664) reclaims the play for the Stuart regime by dramatizing Hobbes’s critique of prophetic enthusiasm. In enlarging upon Macduff’s insurgency against the tyrant Macbeth, however, Davenant merely displaces the rebellious potential of the rogue prophet onto the deciding sovereign citizen. Finally, my fourth chapter argues for Milton’s late-career embrace of Shakespearean equivocation as a tool of liberty in Samson Agonistes (1671). Samson’s death “self-killed” and “immixed” among his foes in a scene of apocalyptic destruction challenges the Hobbesian emphasis on self-preservation and the hierarchical structures on which sovereignty itself depends for coherence. Milton’s mature eschatological vision of the end of sovereignty coincides with his artistic acceptance of the semantic and generic ambiguities of Shakespearean drama.Item Milton aspiring : belief, influence, and Shakespeare(2015-08-12) Moore, Joseph Aaron; Rumrich, John Peter, 1954-; Mallin, Eric Scott; Wojciehowski, Hannah C; Bruster, Douglas S; Dobranski, Stephen BAbstract: Over the last several hundred years, literary criticism has paid generous attention to the works of John Milton and his greatest and, in space and time, closest predecessor, William Shakespeare. However as Alwin Thaler observed almost a century ago, “strangely enough . . . it has neglected the relationships between them.” Exploring the literary, ideological, and political reasons for that neglect, this dissertation searches out the ways that Shakespeare influenced Milton and, more specifically, how that influence contributed to the young Milton’s self-fashioning of the poetic identity he desired for himself: to be the vates poet of the English people. The influence of Shakespeare on the young Milton exemplifies a certain version of imitation that G.W. Pigman III has termed “dissimulative,” expanding on common notions of influence, particularly when authors with seemingly disparate approaches to their art still draw from one another in a way that is intentionally difficult to detect, however powerful. Each of the four chapters offers a reading of one of Milton’s early poems alongside one or more germane works by Shakespeare never before been read in the context of Milton’s early poetic development. Chapter 1 explores the two authors’ competing metaphysical notions of time by reading Milton’s mid-winter birth poem, On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, hereafter referred to as the Nativity Ode, alongside Shakespeare’s play set around the “Festival of the Epiphany,” Twelfth Night: Or, What You Will. Chapter 2 explores the two authors’ competing notions of language, how it works and what it should do, by reading Milton’s A Masque to be Presented at Ludlow Castle, hereafter referred to as Comus, alongside Love’s Labour’s Lost and Measure for Measure. Chapter 3 explores the young Milton’s notions of poetic fame, the proper social role of the poet, and opposing approaches to employing poetry as a means to immortality by reading Lycidas alongside a selection of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The final chapter states a never-before suggested claim about Milton’s early verses “On Shakespeare,” namely that the young poet’s work contains layers of irony: while praising and imitating, Milton is also obliquely criticizing his latest and greatest predecessor.Item Paradise Staged: Milton'S Epic As Dramatic Text(2019-05-01) Hanna, Austin; Rumrich, JohnParadise Lost is an epic poem, yet elements of Milton’s work are undeniably theatrical and are indebted more to the dramatic genre than the epic. Milton, in fact, first conceived the poem as a drama—tentatively titled Adam Unparadised—and at least one section of Satan’s Book IV soliloquy was evidently written with the stage in mind. These original theatrical designs are crucial to the process of (re-)contextualizing Paradise Lost, prompting us to look backward to the influence of Milton’s inherited dramatic tradition as well as forward to modern theatrical adaptation. Milton draws from Shakespearean drama in particular, oscillating generically from tragedy to history to romance and channeling some of Shakespeare’s most compelling villains in his famous portrayal of Satan. Last year, the Stratford Festival staged a new adaptation of Paradise Lost by Erin Shields to much acclaim; the play puts Milton in conversation with present-day political and social issues as well as simply demonstrating the dramatic potential of Milton’s source material. The implications of a dramatic consideration of Paradise Lost touch both stage and classroom. Milton deserves a place in Shakespearean and early modern theater companies’ repertoires. Correspondingly, performance and play should be employed as pedagogical tools, expanding the successful strategy of teaching Shakespeare’s plays through performance to less explicitly dramatic works. Paradise Lost gains much in the transition from page to stage, and the conceits of the dramatic form complement and reinforce the conflicts and ideas at the heart of Milton’s epic.Item Raphael's poetic instruction in Paradise lost(2010-05) Saylor, Sara Rives; Rumrich, John Peter, 1954-; Barret, Jennifer K.In this essay, I argue that the angel Raphael introduces a poetic sensibility into Paradise in order to provide Adam and Eve with “equipment for living” after the Fall. Unlike other critics who have interpreted Raphael as a poet, I focus on the implications of Raphael’s poetic teaching for postlapsarian life. I also call attention to the dangerous effects of Raphael’s “song,” which awakens Adam’s insatiable curiosity about forbidden subjects even as Raphael cautions him to practice temperance and “be lowly wise.” Raphael aims to both “delight and instruct” his audience through poetic discourse, but Milton shows him struggling as Adam’s delight interferes with the angel’s efforts to instruct him. I discuss Raphael’s attempts to mitigate Adam’s enthrallment at his words through disclaimers that remind him to remain temperate in his pursuit of knowledge and to resist subjection to beauty and pleasure—including the charm of “song.” Through Raphael’s meditations on the challenges of poetic representation, Milton reflects on the double-sided nature of his own craft. My essay seeks to reconcile the beneficial purpose of Raphael’s visit with its troubling effects. By reading Raphael’s careful efforts to temper and reorient Adam’s curiosity alongside Milton’s statements on the value of literature in Areopagitica, I explore Milton’s sense of how pleasure, doubt, and even temptation—if rightly tempered—can aid fallen humans in the cultivation of faithful obedience.Item Undressing nature: the uncertain enlightenment and the hermeneutic ontology of the novel(2015-12) Cowles, Lynn Aysley; Garrison, James D.; Rumrich, John; Bertelsen, Lance; Longaker, Mark; Ingrassia, Catherine_Undressing Nature_ argues that in some of the writing produced by pioneers working in new literary generic forms at the end of the Early Modern period, the characteristics of irony, self-reflexive discourse, and the consistent examination of the fictional in relation to the real function narratively and culturally to undermine the empiricist project of totalizing knowledge that prescribed the field of natural philosophy during the Enlightenment. These characteristics, which came to be identified with the genre of the novel in subsequent centuries, refuse the determination of perfect or exact meaning within systems of signification, and they excavate the Enlightenment subject from Cartesian epistemological interiority. As they contemplated divisions between the external material world and the inner thinking mind, some Early Modern figures relied on the rhetorical tradition of figuring words or expression as the dress or clothing that brings forth human thought or nature into the world of interaction and communication. Because of the philosophical position of language or dress in between the universal and the particular, these metaphors provide fascinating examples of the philosophical nexus between literature, culture, and philosophy. By approaching the task of interpreting both words and the world with skepticism, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and Henry Fielding scrutinized the ideological infrastructures of Enlightenment thought and reformulated contemporary understandings of knowing and being. Their ironic discourse interrogated the concept of the stable self, and in the process of doing so, these authors tested out, examined, and developed a discursive structure for meaning and interpretation that relied on the subject’s position in a networked system of identification. In such a system, being and identity are contingent upon the subject’s relationship not only with other subjects but also with material objects in the world like books and clothes. The externalizing of subjectivity removes the self from the Cartesian binary of mind and body and implicates the subject in relation to others such that identity and meaning are understood in an hermeneutic network of ontological signification. Undressing Nature argues that the discursive structure of the novel provides a venue in which theorizers of uncertainty and indeterminacy during the Enlightenment produced narratives that exhibit and reconstruct that hermeneutic ontology.