Approaches To Teaching Milton S Paradise Lost

This second edition of Approaches to Teaching Milton's Paradise Lost addresses Milton in the light of the digital age, new critical approaches to his poem, and his continued presence in contemporary culture. It aims to help instructors enliven the teaching of Paradise Lost and address the challenges presented to students by the poem-- the early modern syntax and vocabulary, the political and theological contexts, and the abounding classical references. The first part of the volume, "Materials," evaluates the many available editions of the poem, points to relevant reference works, recommends additional reading, and outlines useful audiovisual and online aids for teaching Milton's epic poem. The essays in the second part, "Approaches," are grouped by several themes: literary and historical contexts, characters, poetics, critical approaches, classrooms, and performance. The essays cover epic conventions and literary and biblical allusions, new approaches such as ecocriticism and masculinity studies, and reading Milton on the Web, among other topics.

Cultures across the globe have embraced epics: stories of memorable deeds by heroic characters whose actions have significant consequences for their lives and their communities. Incorporating narrative elements also found in sacred history, chronicle, saga, legend, romance, myth, folklore, and the novel, epics throughout history have both animated the imagination and encouraged reflection on what it means to be human. Teaching World Epics addresses ancient and more recent epic works from Africa, Europe, Mesoamerica, and East, Central, and South Asia that are available in English translations. Useful to instructors of literature, peace and conflict studies, transnational studies, women's studies, and religious studies, the essays in this volume focus on epics in sociopolitical and cultural contexts, on the adaptation and reception of epic works, and on themes that are especially relevant today, such as gender dynamics and politics, national identity, colonialism and imperialism, violence, and war. This volume includes discussion of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Giulia Bigolina's Urania, The Book of Dede Korkut, Luís Vaz de Camões's Os Lusíadas, David of Sassoun, The Epic of Askia Mohammed, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the epic of Sun-Jata, Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga's La Araucana, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Kalevala, Kebra Nagast, Kudrun, The Legend of Poṉṉivaḷa Nadu, the Mahabharata, Manas, John Milton's Paradise Lost, Mwindo, the Nibelungenlied, Poema de mio Cid, Popol Wuj, the Ramayana, the Shahnameh, Sirat Bani Hilal, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Statius's Thebaid, The Tale of the Heike, Three Kingdoms, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá's Historia de la Nueva México, and Virgil's Aeneid.

This new guide leads readers through the complexities of the text with detailed commentary on core sections of the poem, as well as a range of interpretative frameworks and contexts.

This book reads Milton's Paradise Lost as a poem that seeks to educate its readers by narrating the education of its main characters.

This edited volume explores the combination of cultural phenomena that have established and canonized the work of John Milton in a global context, from interlingual translations to representations of Milton's work in verbal media, painting, stained glass, dance, opera, and symphony.

Milton?s early commentators?Henry Todd, Thomas Newton, Joseph Addison, and others?not only knew their classics well, they took them seriously as models of literary excellence and repositories of values. In the twentieth century, however, the classics have become mere ?background.? As a consequence, William M. Porter argues, not only is the foundational dimension of Milton?s poetry now hardly visible, even to scholars, but the potential of Milton?s poetry to revitalize the reading of the classics has been diminished. In this insightful study, Porter attempts once again to read both the classics and Milton?s epic poem sensitively and intelligently. He exposes the recklessly speculative and tendentious character of much earlier work on Milton?s allusions, in which allusions were promiscuously posited and in which Paradise Lost was too often regarded naively as triumphing over the classics. Porter demonstrates that Milton?s allusions, in which allusions to the classics, while fewer than has been supposed, are rich with wit, irony, and thought that can be grasped only by a reader with a double perspective.

Milton's shorter poetry and prose can be challenging to teach, but they reward instructors and students many times over: they introduce in compact, accessible form the themes and difficult syntax of Paradise Lost, expand and comment on the epic and on one another, and provide students ideal training in close reading. The essays in this volume constitute a road map for exploring the most frequently taught of Milton's shorter works-"Lycidas," the Nativity Ode, Comus, Samson Agonistes, Areopagitica, and The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce-as well as the sonnets, Paradise Regained, The Reason of Church Government, and The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, among others. The contributors demonstrate ways of incorporating Milton's shorter works into a range of classrooms, from survey courses to Milton seminars; list specific tools to make the works' relevance and aesthetic pleasures available to a wide variety of student populations; and offer a wealth of techniques for helping students navigate Milton's demanding style and complicated historical context. Like all volumes in the Approaches series, this collection includes a convenient survey of original and supplementary materials and a comprehensive array of classroom tactics. Three sections of essays provide general approaches to the poetry and prose, through biography, genre, literary and political history, and other methodologies. The fourth section addresses the teaching of individual poems, and the final section articulates ways into specific prose works.