This thesis discusses the influence of Milton on the poetry of Wordsworth.

This dissertation considers the development of an ethics stemming from the Augustinian revival of early modern England, and the subsequent effect of this ethics on the literary culture of the period. The Preface claims that religious and textual communities operate according to a “cultural mobility” that eludes conventional neo-historicist approaches to literary culture, and Paul Ricoeur’s aphorism, “the symbol gives rise to thought,” serves as a model for thinking through this mobility. Augustinian ethics is a cultural phenomenon in the period, because people are thinking about Augustine, giving new life to his works through their own expressions of thought. After exploring the ways in which the Augustinian revival was brought about during the early modern period in the Introduction, one such expression of thought, John Donne’s relationship with early modern print culture, is examined in Chapter One. Following the theoretical outline of Augustine’s Christianization of Ciceronian rhetoric in his De Doctrina Christiana, it is suggested that though Donne’s aversion to the print publication of his poetry may have begun as a result of his “gentlemanly disdain” of the press, it ultimately found its sustenance in the form of an Augustinian ethic. Chapter Two examines the possibility of a metaphorical acquisition of Augustinian hermeneutics in the metadrama of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This hermeneutics ultimately calls into question the epistemological framework of Theseus’s skeptical aesthetics, suggesting that a more inclusive aesthetics based on charity can elevate the stage to its proper dignity. The last chapter turns from the communal implications of Augustinian ethics to its subjective implications by examining Augustine’s inner light theology and the role it plays in John Milton’s late poetry. Instead of falling in line with criticism that sees the simultaneous publication of Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes as a dialectical meditation on the virtues of pacifism and the evils of religious violence, this reading suggests that the late poetry asserts the ethical rights of those who attend to the inner light, whether they be peaceful or violent. / text

In the grand invocation at the beginning of Book VII of his epic Paradise Lost, John Milton selects as his muse Urania, who is traditionally the Muse of Astronomy in classical texts. He immediately excludes that possible identification, however, when he writes that she is “Nor of the Muses nine.” By calling on her “meaning” rather than her “Name,” Milton relies on a multitude of precedents and traditions, repackaged for his own times and his own idiosyncratic purposes, that critics have consistently failed to recognize or investigate sufficiently. This dissertation looks diachronically at various occurrences of Uranian discourse in literature, historically both before and after Milton, to locate thematic similarities to his works and to help define his Urania accordingly. In spite of her explicit exclusion, the search begins with Urania as Muse of Astronomy because from her mythopoetic genesis in Ancient Greece, other myths are engrafted onto her, most notably Plato’s Uranian Aphrodite as defined in his Symposium. This transformed Urania appears in ancient and medieval cosmic journey and dream narratives and evolves by the Renaissance into an oddly Christianized muse. She becomes a vehicle for heavenly, divine truths that each devout Christian rightly senses in his conscience. In this capacity she promotes friendship and chastity, while she also opposes licentiousness, particularly the lusts of tyrants. In early myths, the Muses are victims of tyranny; but in later appearances, they often sell their patronage of the arts unscrupulously to wicked kings and the flattering poets who are paid by them. Urania’s patronage manages to distance itself from her sisters’ misallocations of inspiration, and parts of the Book VII invocation are clearly an indictment of royal excess. In conclusion, a small group of late-Victorian English poets, mainly from Oxford, call themselves the “Uranians.” Although they too draw from the same traditions as Milton and from Milton himself, they appropriate Urania to satisfy their own political and sexual agendas in a conscious and deliberate revision. / text

Jacques Derrida argued that a supplement "adds only to replace." Since the blind Milton dictated his epic to amanuenses, the text of Paradise Lost may be conceived as a supplement to an aural performance. This dissertation itself supplements another project, a digital "audiotext" or classroom edition of Paradise Lost on which I am collaborating with Professor John Rumrich and others. In the audiotext, we reassert the duality of the work as both a print text and an oral epic by integrating an audio recording with an electronic text of the poem. This pairing is informed by our own experiences teaching Paradise Lost as well as by cognitive research demonstrating that comprehension increases when students read and hear a text sequentially or simultaneously. As both a wellspring of the audiotext project and a meditation on its aims, this dissertation investigates the actual effects on readers of print and digital supplements putatively designed to enhance their appreciation or study of the work. The first two chapters examine the rationale and influence of the authorial and editorial matter added to early editions. The final two chapters explore the ways in which digital technology is changing how scholars and readers interact with Paradise Lost and other works of literature. I begin by examining why the first edition of Paradise Lost arrived in 1667 bearing no front matter other than a title page. In Chapter Two, I argue that critics have undervalued the interpretive significance of the prose summaries or Arguments that Milton appended to Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes. Chapter Three relates the current emphasis on electronic textual encoding in editorial theory to the ideological dominance of Richard Bentley's conjectural approach in the early seventeenth century and of Fredson Bowers's copy-text approach in the 1960s and 70s. Chapter Four introduces the audiotext project and contrast its goals with those of other projects in the Digital Humanities. The audiotext's interface offers multiple viewing modes, enabling the user to display the reading text alone or in parallel with annotations and other supplements. Unlike prior editions and archives, therefore, it accommodates both immersive and analytical reading modes. / text

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Access to abstract restricted until 07/2016. / Eco-typology and the tree of life in Milton's Paradise lost -- The Matthew Bible, eco-typology and the tree of life in Milton's Eden -- The Geneva Bible, eco-typology and the fruit of the living word in Paradise lost -- Speed's 'Genealogies', the King James Bible and the seed of grace in the later books of Paradise lost. / Department of English

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No substantial studies, at least to my knowledge, have yet been dedicated either to Milton's or to Shelley's extensive poetic use of the grotesque. This omission surprises me, especially given the voluminous critical attention both authors receive. Neither Milton nor Shelley's grotesquerie can be viewed as the basis of artistic method or artistic achievement as we might with, say, Rabelais, or Poe, or even Kafka. And neither Milton nor Shelley is self-consciously an artist of "the grotesque." In fact, Milton, from his seventeenth century perspective, would scarcely have regarded the term as being applicable to literary criticism at all. And as a late Romantic, Shelley defined himself rather as a poet of the imagination. Nonetheless I will show that both artists avail themselves of a grotesque aesthetic to achieve some of their most powerful and provocative poetry: we may here consider, for instance, Milton's memorable descriptions of the incongruities of Hell and the deformities of its fallen denizens in Paradise Lost, or Shelley's Gothic touches and his perplexing distortion of conventional linguistic and dramatic form in Prometheus Unbound. / Aside from general considerations of the grotesque in these texts, I will especially focus on how Milton's and Shelley's uses of the grotesque mode provide us with unique, and often fascinating vantage points from which to appreciate their respective political concerns and revolutionary interests. While I expect this critical approach will elucidate Milton and Shelley in their own separate artistic and political spheres, I am especially interested to compare and contrast the poets, to show how the quite different uses made of the grotesque in Prometheus Unbound and Paradise Lost reflect the various ways in which Shelley responds to Milton in his role as a revolutionary forefather.

As epic was considered a culturally comprehensive genre, so Spenser's Faerie Queene and Milton's Paradise Lost provide an effective locus for inquiry into literary representations of body marks in the Renaissance, and hence of the body itself. While grounded on central principles of Renaissance poetics such as delightful teaching, utpictura poesis, and catharsis, Spenser's and Milton's graphic accounts of wounds and diverse other types of body marks show corporeality can have positive import for the soul and heroic identity, just as they are shaped in part by bodily experienees. This dissertation thus reconsiders the widespread assumption that early moderns primarily viewed the body as a subservient yet sometimes threatening container for the soul.... / Une épopée fut culturellement considérée comme un vaste genre: The FaerieQueene, et Paradise Lost, de Spenser et Milton, sont pertinents pour l'étude desreprésentations littéraires des marques corporelles durant la Renaissance, et du corps.Basées sur les principes de la poésie de l'époque, comme l'enseignement délicieux, utpictura poesis, et la catharsis, les explications graphiques de blessures et autres cicatricesde Spenser et Milton montrent que la matérialité peut avoir une portée positive sur l'âmeet l'identité héroïque: elles sont formées par des expériences corporelles.