• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.64 no.1
• /
• pp.135-150
• /
• 2018

Focusing on the hermeneutic instability of a key word of Paradise Lost, "wander," this study attempts to situate John Milton's early modern epic in the longue $dur{\acute{e}}e$ historical transition from seignorial to capitalist mode of production, especially the displacement and reorganization of producer population, a corollary of early phase of modernization. The historic experience of vagrancy and its normalization, and the concomitant shift of the primary human sociability from given to voluntary bonds, I suggest, shape and inform Milton's early modern rewriting of the Biblical story of the fall and his revising of the heroic epic romance into a plebeian romance of a wandering, companionate couple. While building on the critical consensus on this poem's deliberate distancing from the tradition of classical epic and chivalric romance, this essay argues that Milton re-appropriates and re-channels the aspirational aspect of chivalric wandering, or mobility, for his plebeian heroes, a companionate conjugal couple. The hermeneutic instability of the word wander, this essay suggests, captures the duality of the historic experience of vagrancy, both the tragic experience of displacement and the liberational and uplifting dimension of that experience.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.56 no.1
• /
• pp.135-156
• /
• 2010

In the 1640's and 1650's, Milton wrote many prose works on a variety of topics such as education, church polity, divorce, censorship, regicide, tithing, civil liberty, and blindness. Much of his prose shows us turbulent decades of English history. In this period, he also published his first collection of poems and wrote sonnets. He wrote 23 sonnets in his life, and many sonnets Milton wrote after he had become Latin secretary are occasional poems in historical time. Milton's sonnets, as Annabel Patterson says, are a marker in his personal development, in his life, in his career as a writer, and in the history of his time. Four sonnets (15, 16, 17, 23), written between 1648 and 1655, were not published in the collected edition of Milton's poem in 1673. These sonnets, addressed to leaders of the Parliamentary party during the English revolution, Thomas Fairfax, Oliver Cromwell, and Henry Vane, and to his friend Cyriack Skinner, have been known as "commonwealth" sonnets. They are also called as "heroic sonnets" because they have the common style and theme with his later heroic epic poems. These sonnets were finally published in 1694 by Milton's nephew John Phillips. Milton was interested in religious, domestic, and political liberty for his lifetime, and his heroic sonnets also deal with these ideas of liberty. Milton asks civil liberty from Fairfax, freedom in religion from Cromwell, and from Vane for the reconciliation of both. The aim of this article is to examine how the rhetorical strategies of his "left-handed" prose interact with those of his "right-handed" poetry. This paper explores the relationship between Milton's heroic sonnets and his prose works, such as The Second Defense of the People of England, A Treatise of Civil Power, and The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings. Milton deals with the critical issues of religious tolerance, the separation of church and state, liberty of conscience and defense of his blindness, and attempts to define the statesman's role in peacetime England in these heroic sonnets and prose works.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.58 no.6
• /
• pp.1103-1117
• /
• 2012

This paper focuses on eighteenth-century English pastor, poet, and hymnist, Isaac Watts (1674-1748), a significant yet neglected nonconformist dissenter, who defines a public religion and transforms poetry as a new literary political genre. During England's post-Revolutionary religio-political turmoil, Watts's poem, "The Hurry of the Spirits, in a Fever and Nervous Disorders" (1734), deliberately engages in a methodical refusal to settle upon a single system of images or terms for describing or referring to the speaker's identity or situation. Watts's, literal and metaphoric, refusal to identify with one religio-political approach to nonconformist dissent has been the very point of criticism that not only undermines the poet's monumental work on hymns but also the lasting impact that the poet had upon England's national consciousness. This study, therefore, questions why the poet refuses to choose one ideal path in his pursuit for religious freedom and, further, analyzes how the hymn writer defends his demotic aesthetics. This paper investigates Watts's comprehensive and detailed formulation of what a secularized "social religion" should entail and, further, explores its beneficial role in the pursuit for society's peace. In contrast to Milton's apocalyptic vengeance, Watts's nonconformist goal seeks to balance and locate authority in the individual with the ancient ideal of a "sacred order" that is represented in "The Hurry of the Spirits" through the means of poetic imagination.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.22 no.9
• /
• pp.628-633
• /
• 2022

John Milton's 17th century epic poem, Paradise Regained, is deconstructed or re-birthed in Panter's new graphic novel, Songy of Paradise in 2017, and the most notable change comes from the main character, Jesus. In the original text, Jesus as an "anointed universal King" achieves his greatness in the progress of lonely journey, and is declared as Son of God. Therefore, Panter's description of Songy as hillbilly is quite stunning. Panter's Punk vagabond, however, shares common aspects with Milton's Jesus in terms of his stubborn resistance against Satan's temptation. Jesus and Songy succeeds in the battle against Satan leading their talk into the "failure of a conversation." This study examines how ironically this punk art embraces the original character of the grand epic while destroying it utterly.

• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.18 no.1
• /
• pp.23-51
• /
• 2018

This paper focuses on historical instances of iconoclasm after the Reformation to reveal how iconoclasm had greatly contributed to the formation of the Protestant mindset in the early modern times. During the English civil war, when iconoclastic campaigns and movements were in full tide, the paper argues that the notions of novelty and progress were more positively accepted among radical religious groups. To put it in another way, the paper suggests a different way of looking the formation of Protestant habitus by giving accounts of how iconoclastic impulses spurred diverse religious groups during the civil war to break the mold of conservative thinking and to revolutionize the print culture hitherto based on patronage and served as a buttress for status-quo. From this analysis, then, we are ledto the different portrait of the protestant in the seventeenth century, whose mindset was not quite as solitary and guilt ridden as Max Weber would have us believe.