Milton, evil and literary history

Resource Information

The work Milton, evil and literary history represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in University of Missouri Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Milton, evil and literary history

Statement of responsibility

Claire Colebrook

Creator

• Colebrook, Claire

Subject

• Good and evil in literature
• Life in literature
• Meaning (Philosophy) in literature
• Milton, John, 1608-1674 -- Criticism and interpretation | History
• Symbolism in literature
• Good and evil -- Philosophy

Language

eng

Summary

"Milton, Evil and Literary History addresses the ways in which we read literary history according to quite specific images of growth, development, progression, flourishing and succession. Goodness has always been aligned with a life of expansion, creation, production and fruition, while evil is associated with the inert, non-relational, static and stagnant. These associations have also underpinned a distinction between good and evil notions of capitalism, where good exchange enables agents to enhance their living potential and is contrasted with the evils of a capitalist system that circulates without any reference to life or spirit. Such images of a ghostly and technical economy divorced from animating origin are both central to Milton's theology and poetry and to the theories of literary history through which Milton is read. Regarded as a radical precursor to Romanticism, Milton's poetry supposedly requires the release of his radical spiritual content from the fetters of received orthodoxy. This literary and historical imagery of releasing the radical spirit of a text from the dead weight of received tradition is, this book argues, the dominant doxa of historicism and one which a counter-reading of Milton ought to question."--BOOK JACKET

Member of

• Continuum literary studies

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

821/.4

Index

index present

LC call number

PR3587.3

LC item number

.C66 2008

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

Continuum literary studies series