Milton's leveller God / David Williams.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Williams, David, 1945- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Milton, John, 1608-1674--Criticism and interpretation.

Milton, John.

Politics in literature.

God in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (513 pages) : illustrations, tables

Place of Publication:

Montreal & Kingston, [Ontario] ; London, [England] ; Chicago, [Illinois] : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017.

Summary:

"John Milton's epic poems are beginning to lose their relevance in a post-Christian world. Critics regularly ask: Isn't Paradise Lost a monument to dead ideas? The aim of this book is to restore Milton's cultural centrality by showing how his God remains the unacknowledged ground of popular democracy, a political form invented by social levellers in the 1640s. While the vast range of Milton's sources in classical republican thought, Christian humanism, and Machiavellian discourse have been well-documented by scholars, we are just beginning to understand how much his republican prose is inflected by his association with Marchamont Nedham's Mercurius Politicus, the weekly newsbook that Milton licensed in 1651-52. And Nedham himself was closely associated with Leveller thought, which he routinely dressed in Roman republican ideas. From thousands of pages of the newsbook and Leveller writings, I identify a deep repertoire of phrasings and ideas that reveal Milton's sympathy for Leveller ideas in his prose from 1644-49, his ambivalent support for both a classical republic and a Leveller democracy in the 1650s, and his active expression of Leveller ideas in his epic poems after the Restoration. Oliver Cromwell, whom the Levellers identified as the Apostate, serves as a distinctive model for Satan in Paradise Lost, while Milton's Heaven evolves from a feudal monarchy to a human world of liberty and equality, even after the Fall. As with his social heresies, Milton's religious heresies remain a carefully couched force for liberalism and sexual equality, since the figure of a material deity unsettles all the old hierarchies of soul/body, man/woman, reason/will, and ruler/ruled."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Front Matter

Contents

Preface

A Note on Archival Sources, Abbreviations, and Spellings

Introduction

A Levelling History

The Levellers and the Council of State

Milton and Politicus

Paradise Lost

“The Tyranny of Heaven”

“The Great Consult”

“All Power I Give Thee”

“Two of Far Nobler Shape”

“The Winged Hierarch”

“Behold the Excellence”

“And Thence Diffuse His Good”

“Among Unequals What Societie?”

“Here Grows the Cure of All”

“To Her Own Inclining Left”

“Brought Down to Dwell on Eeven Ground”

“So God with Man Unites”

Paradise Regain'd

“Searching What Was Writ”

“Also It Is Written”

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF cover (ebrary, viewed June 15, 2017).

ISBN:

9780773550353

0773550356

9780773550360

0773550364

OCLC:

967787931