Course details

Name: ENGL - 518

Title: MILTON

Section: 01

Semester: Spring - 2023

Credits: 3

Description:
This course is dedicated to exploring the poetry and prose of John Milton. Born in London in 1608, Milton lived through an astonishing and tumultuous period of literary, historical, political, and theological change. He was a little more than three years old when, in 1612, the last person ever to be executed in England for heresy was burned at the stake for refusing to recant his so-called antitrinitarianism, a belief that Milton himself would come to espouse. In 1649, the first King of England ever to be tried by his own subjects and executed for high crimes against them was beheaded on a scaffold in London, an event that Milton would come to take a leading role in defending. Milton saw the overthrow of the monarchy and its eventual restoration, the removal and the return of episcopal church government, and the only brief period of republican rule that England has ever known. While touring Italy in the late 1630s, he met Galileo, and Galileo would go on to feature in multiple of Milton’s works. Shakespeare died when Milton was seven. When Milton died, Jonathan Swift was days away from turning the same age.

Milton, however, did not just live through this period of great change. He participated in its changes, largely through his writing, and he did so more profoundly and extensively than any English writer before or after him. He wrote some of the most significant Latin and English prose works of the century, from the English /Areopagitica/ to the Latin /Pro populo Anglicano defensio/ (Defense for the English People), and he found himself celebrated and reviled in circles across England and Continental Europe for his pains. He composed influential works of polemical and systematic theology that percolated with ideas of frequently startling radicalism. He wrote educational treatises and textbooks, defenses of toleration, a history of Britain. And when that was all said and done, he composed the single greatest epic poem ever written in English, /Paradise Lost/.

In this course we will read all of Milton’s major works of poetry – including /Paradise Lost/, /Paradise Regained/, and /Samson Agonistes/ – together with a number of Milton’s most important works of prose. Throughout our reading of his works, we will be giving close consideration both to the internal dynamics of Milton’s texts and to their dynamic relationship to the various contexts in which they appeared: literary, linguistic, political, religious, bibliographical, etc. Extensive consideration will also be given to the relationship between Milton’s works and some of the most important movements in modern scholarship and literary criticism of the past century: from New Criticism, feminist criticism, and reader-response theory, to New Historicism, Presentism, and Ecocriticism.

Schedule: Tuesday From 5:30 pm To 8:00 pm

Graduation requirements:

• Any Literature (1e)
• Genre Study (Poetry)
• Pre-1700 (1a)
• Pre-1800 (1b)
• Pre-1900 (1c)
• Women and Gender Studies (3c)
• Pre-1800 British (TE 1b)
• Graduate (BA/MA)

Teaching Faculty: Miller Jeffrey (millerje)

Is course canceled: No