Majestick Milton

ab 60,90 

Anne-Julia Zwierlein

British Imperial Expansion and Transformations of Paradise Lost, 1667-1837

ISBN 978-3-8258-5432-9
Band-Nr. 13
Jahr 2001
Seiten 512
Bindung gebunden
Reihe Studien zur englischen Literatur und Wissenschaftsgeschichte

Beschreibung

This study investigates how Milton’s texts, above all
Paradise Lost, were read in the context of
eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British empire
building. Milton’s epic was implicated in the articulation
and criticism of early modem colonialist discourse; it also
lent itself easily to later imperial and anti-imperial
appropriations. Milton the `national poet’ emerged from the
strife between Whigs and Tories for his legacy; this book
analyses Milton’s presence in a number of discourses that
are characteristic of the Whig model of secular history: the
discourses about empire, language and literary criticism,
travelling and astronomy, agriculture, commerce and
Pax Britannica, as well as the slave-trade. The
temporal frame extends from the Restoration through the loss
of the American colonies to the Second British Empire and
`Milton in India’. Eighteenth-century British national
epics, commented Milton editions and poetic Milton
recreations invented a tradition for the British Empire and
reintroduced the Virgilian concept of translatio
imperii, transforming Milton’s allegories of divine power
into descriptions of secular authority. This study
contextualizes traditional stories about `Milton and
Romanticism’ by examining mostly `minor’ writers; still,
Dryden, Johnson, Pope and Blake feature in some detail. The
epilogue shows that even postcolonial rewritings of Milton
make more sense in the light of the eighteenth-century
Milton and his presence in the nineteenth-century British
colonial education syllabus.