The New England Milton: Literary Reception and Cultural Authority in the Early Republic Contributor(s): Van Anglen, Kevin (Author) |
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ISBN: 0271028270 ISBN-13: 9780271028279 Publisher: Penn State University Press OUR PRICE: $30.64 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 1993 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | Gothic & Romance - Poetry | European - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh - Literary Criticism | Poetry |
Dewey: 821 |
Physical Information: 0.62" H x 6" W x 9" (0.90 lbs) 272 pages |
Themes: - Cultural Region - British Isles |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: The New England Milton concentrates on the poet's place in the writings of the Unitarians and the Transcendentalists, especially Emerson, Thoreau, William Ellery Channing, Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker, and demonstrates that his reception by both groups was a function of their response as members of the New England elite to older and broader sociopolitical tensions in Yankee culture as it underwent the process of modernization. For Milton and his writings (particularly Paradise Lost) were themselves early manifestations of the continuing crisis of authority that later afflicted the dominant class and professions in Boston; and so, the Unitarian Milton, like the Milton of Emerson's lectures or Thoreau's Walden, quite naturally became the vehicle for literary attempts by these authors to resolve the ideological contradictions they had inherited from the Puritan past. |
Contributor Bio(s): Van Anglen, Kevin: - K. P. Van Anglen is Lecturer on History and Literature and Keeper of the F. O. Matthiessen Collection, Harvard University. He is the editor of the Translations volume of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (1986), and a contributor to the forthcoming Excursions volume in that series. |