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This Norton Critical Edition includes: The 1674 text of Paradise
Lost, with emendations and adoptions from the first edition and
from the scribal manuscript. Spelling and punctuation have been
modernised for student readers. An illuminating introduction and
abundant explanatory annotations by Gordon Teskey. Source and
background materials, including Milton's greatest prose work,
Areopagitica, in its entirety and key selections from the Bible.
Topically arranged commentaries and interpretations-seventy-eight
in all, thirty-nine of them new to the Second Edition-from classic
assessments to current scholarship. A glossary of names and
suggestions for further reading.
From the distinguished literary scholar Gordon Teskey comes an
essay collection that restores Spenser to his rightful prominence
in Renaissance studies, opening up the epic of The Faerie Queene as
a grand, improvisatory project on human nature, and
arguing-controversially-that it is Spenser, not Milton, who is the
more important and relevant poet for the modern world. There is
more adventure in The Faerie Queene than in any other major English
poem. But the epic of Arthurian knights, ladies, and dragons in
Faerie Land, beloved by C. S. Lewis, is often regarded as quaint
and obscure, and few critics have analyzed the poem as an
experiment in open thinking. In this remarkable collection, the
renowned literary scholar Gordon Teskey examines the masterwork
with care and imagination, explaining the theory of allegory-now
and in Edmund Spenser's Elizabethan age-and illuminating the poem's
improvisatory moments as it embarks upon fairy tale, myth, and
enchantment. Milton, often considered the greatest English poet
after Shakespeare, called Spenser his "original." But Teskey argues
that while Milton's rigid ideology in Paradise Lost has failed the
test of time, Spenser's allegory invites engagement on contemporary
terms ranging from power, gender, violence, and virtue ethics, to
mobility, the posthuman, and the future of the planet. The Faerie
Queene was unfinished when Spenser died in his forties. It is the
brilliant work of a poet of youthful energy and philosophical
vision who opens up new questions instead of answering old ones.
The epic's grand finale, "The Mutabilitie Cantos," delivers a
vision of human life as dizzyingly turbulent and constantly
changing, leaving a future open to everything.
John Milton is regarded as the greatest English poet after
Shakespeare. Yet for sublimity and philosophical grandeur, Milton
stands almost alone in world literature. His peers are Homer,
Virgil, Dante, Wordsworth, and Goethe: poets who achieve a total
ethical and spiritual vision of the world. In this panoramic
interpretation, the distinguished Milton scholar Gordon Teskey
shows how the poet's changing commitments are subordinated to an
aesthetic that joins beauty to truth and value to ethics. The art
of poetry is rediscovered by Milton as a way of thinking in the
world as it is, and for the world as it can be. Milton's early
poems include the heroic Nativity Ode; the seductive paired poems
"L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso"; the mythological pageant Comus,
with its comically diabolical enchanter and its serious debate on
the human use of nature; and "Lycidas," perhaps the greatest short
poem in English and a prophecy of vast human displacements in the
modern world. Teskey follows Milton's creative development in three
phases, from the idealistic transcendence of the poems written in
his twenties to the political engagement of the gritty,
hard-hitting poems of his middle years. The third phase is that of
"transcendental engagement," in the heaven-storming epic Paradise
Lost, and the great works that followed it: the intense
intellectual debate Paradise Regained, and the tragedy Samson
Agonistes.
The only form of monumental artistic expression practiced from
antiquity to the Enlightenment, allegory evolved to its fullest
complexity in Dante's Commedia and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Drawing
on a wide range of literary, visual, and critical works in the
European tradition, Gordon Teskey provides both a literary history
of allegory and a theoretical account of the genre which confronts
fundamental questions about the violence inherent in cultural
forms.Approaching allegory as the site of intense ideological
struggle, Teskey argues that the desire to raise temporal
experience to ever higher levels of abstraction cannot be realized
fully but rather creates a "rift" that allegory attempts to
conceal. After examining the emergence of allegorical violence from
the gendered metaphors of classical idealism, Teskey describes its
amplification when an essentially theological form of expression
was politicized in the Renaissance by the introduction of the
classical gods, a process leading to the replacement of allegory by
political satire and cartoons. He explores the relationship between
rhetorical voice and forms of indirect speech (such as irony) and
investigates the corporeal emblematics of violence in authors as
different as Machiavelli and Yeats. He considers the large
organizing theories of culture, particularly those of Eliot and
Frye, which take the place in the modern world of earlier
allegorical visions. Concluding with a discussion of the
Mutabilitie Cantos, Teskey describes Spenser's metaphysical
allegory, which is deconstructed by its own invocation of
genealogical struggle, as a prophetic vision and a form of warning.
Composed after the collapse of his political hopes, Milton's great
poems "Paradise Lost," "Paradise Regained," and "Samson Agonistes"
are an effort to understand what it means to be a poet on the
threshold of a post-theological world. The argument of "Delirious
Milton," inspired in part by the architectural theorist Rem
Koolhaas's "Delirious New York," is that Milton's creative power is
drawn from a rift at the center of his consciousness over the
question of creation itself. This rift forces the poet to oscillate
deliriously between two incompatible perspectives, at once
affirming and denying the presence of spirit in what he creates.
From one perspective the act of creation is centered in God and the
purpose of art is to imitate and praise the Creator. From the other
perspective the act of creation is centered in the human, in the
built environment of the modern world. The oscillation itself,
continually affirming and negating the presence of spirit, of a
force beyond the human, is what Gordon Teskey means by delirium. He
concludes that the modern artist, far from being characterized by
what Benjamin (after Baudelaire) called "loss of the aura," is
invested, as never before, with a shamanistic spiritual power that
is mediated through art.
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