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MILTON
New Readings Series |
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| Harvester Wheatsheaf, London
& New York 1991 |
...
I have never encountered such stylistic mastery before
in literary criticism.
William
B Hunter |
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This book reappraises Milton's
works in the light of modern awareness of the polyphonic and
conflict-generating ambiguity of literary language. At the
same time, the author seeks a 'holistic reading practice'
within a reader-orientated criticism. This allows multiple
reading methods in a language accessible to the common reader
and permits room for reflection on the author's possible conscious
and unconscious intentions.
Close analysis of Milton's philosophy of language and his
literary usage reveals the sense he shared with Bacon, Hobbes
and radical linguistic theoreticians of the seventeenth century
of the unstable and problematic character of language itself.
The language of Paradise Lost has as its dynamic
the breakdown of the eye and the word, in the light of the
perspectivism of Baroque and the relativism of telescopic
perspective: the poem at once glorifies and denounces its
God. Paradise Regained is studied as a unique
experiment in a reclusive language of the interior self; Samson
Agonistes as a male language which violently repudiates
the body of the mother-tongue, as the hero excises the feminine
affiliations from himself. |
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Out of
Print
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This entire presentation Copyright
©
Stevie Davies
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