Using a framework based on J. L. Austin's understanding of performative speech and Angela Esterhammer's work on how things are done with words in Milton's and Blake's poetry, this study provides an extended close reading of the speech acts of characters in Blake's epic poem Milton. With the exception of what we learn about in the part of the poem known as the Bard's Song, Blake's Milton is dedicated to providing an incredibly detailed account of the numerous facets of the instant of time immediately prior to apocalypse, an instant in which Milton is the protagonist, and Blake himself a participant. This study explores how in the poem sacred history proceeds towards and through the instant by means of the speech act. This extended commentary is intended for not just Blake scholars but also the common reader who wishes to approach Blake's brief epic for the first time. For scholars, this monograph offers a full account of a crucial but previously unexplored theme in the scholarship about Milton. For the common reader, it offers a comprehensive introduction to what Northrop Frye called 'one of the most gigantic imaginative achievements in English poetry'.

In Roman religion, Terminus was an agrarian god who protected boundary markers. Stones were often used to provide an effective means for marking these boundaries, although a stump or a tree sometimes served to demarcate adjacent properties. The need to demarcate boundaries and define ends continues to shape our way of thinking at the most fundamental level. The articles in this book investigate, among other things, developments in literature, film, historiography, and new digital entertainment, to see how they reflect cultural anxieties about 'the end' and/or how they are determined by the need to mark boundaries. The contributions are organized so that they reflect thematic, national, and chronological perspectives. But, they also show that it is possible to identify several threads of continuity in the way that 'the end' has been conceptualized. By examining ideas of culmination, conclusion, closure, finale, and termination - from the perspective of a number of various genres, cultural formations, and historical contexts - these essays on 'terminus' show how endings are carriers of meaning in social and cultural contexts. (Series: Interdisciplinaere Kulturstudier / Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies - Vol. 5)