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Also Recommended
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John Milton, Philip Pullman
£10.99
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John Milton
Life, Work, and Thought
Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns
512 pages
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48 halftones
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234x156mm
978-0-19-928984-4
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Hardback
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23 October 2008
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- A fascinating new biography of a seminal writer, whose career spanned one of the most turbulent periods in English history
- Based on fresh archival research - essential reading for scholars
- Accessibly written and including numerous illustrations
- Deeply challenging to received ideas about Milton's life, work, and thought
This book re-examines scrupulously the writings and the life records of John Milton, in the context of a proper understanding of the recent developments in seventeenth-century historiography. Milton's thought has often been too simply described. The approach here is to interrogate more sceptically notions like puritanism, republicanism, radicalism, and dissent. A more complex story emerges, of Milton's culturally rich but ideologically conformist early decades, and of his radicalisation during the later years of Laudianism. We track the internal dynamics of English puritanism in the 1640s and the impact that has on his own convictions. In the
1650s Milton's thought and beliefs were reconciled to the role as public servant. In the 1660s a renewed confidence carried him towards the completion of his greatest project, Paradise Lost, and his final years were ones of creative fulfilment and renewed political engagement. Amid the discontinuities occasioned by shifting political circumstance, by the exigencies of polemical context, and the diversity of genres in which he wrote, Milton emerged as a major political thinker and significant systematic theologian, as well as the most eloquent prose writer and most accomplished poet of the age. A more human Milton appears in these pages, flawed, self-contractory, self-serving, arrogant, passionate, ruthless, ambitious, and cunning, as well as the literary genius who achieved so
much.Readership: Miltonists; readers of literary biography; historians of the seventeenth century
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Gordon Campbell, Professor of Renaissance Studies, University of Leicester, and Thomas N. Corns, Professor of English, University of Bangor
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"Impressive, rigorous, nuanced...the fullest portrait yet...Anchored by impeccable scholarly acumen, this biography supersedes all recent accounts." - Choice "Impressive, rigorous, nuanced... the fullest portrait yet of this brilliant, controversial, and ambitious politician, theologian, and artist. Anchored by impeccable scholarly acumen, this biography supercedes all recent accounts." - Choice "An illuminating accretion of historical and personal detail; it is an assiduous study of a difficult man." - Sophie Read, Times Higher Education Supplement "Lucid and engaging." - Sophie Read, Times Literary Supplement "A book of permanent value...tight,
learned, packed biography." - Colin Burrow, Literary Review "Exceptionally good...tight, learned, packed biography." - Colin Burrow, Literary Review "Marvellous new biography...This is an enthralling, rewarding read." - Marcus Nevitt, Daily Telegraph "An exceptionally readable and interesting relation of the poet's life that makes some fascinating observations about the work." - Advance praise from Philip Pullman
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Introduction
Part I 1608-1632
1: Childhood
2: St Paul's School
3: Cambridge: the undergraduate years
4: Cambridge: the postgraduate years
Part II 1632-1639
5: Hammersmith
6: Horton
7: Italy
Part III 1639-49
8: The Crisis of Government
9: The First Civil War
10: The Road to Regicide
Part IV 1649-1660
11: The Purged Parliament
12: The Protectorate
13: From the Death of Oliver Cromwell to the Restoration
Part V 1660-67
14: Milton in 1660
15: Surviving the Restoration
16: Plague, Fire and Paradise Lost
17: The Sunlit Uplands
Part VI 1667 and after
18: Posthumous Life and Nachlass
Bibliography
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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