Digging Up Milton

London, 1790: John Milton, one of Britain s greatest poets, has been dead for over a century. Lizzie Grant, gravedigger, wife and entrepreneur, is very much alive. When Milton s bones surface at St Giles Church in London s Cripplegate, illiterate yet enterprising Lizzie seizes the opportunity to make her mark on history. But Lizzie hasn't accounted for Milton's power as a hero, a revolutionary, and a literary genius. Amongst circulating body parts and surrounded by hypocrisy, Lizzie s dreams start to unravel. In 1790 it seems a lot of people want a piece of Milton. This darkly humorous novel vividly captures the boisterous, bawdy life of the 18th century London streets in a tale of greed, guilt and a paradise lost. * * * Jennifer Wallace is a clear and eloquent writer - The Sunday Telegraph * * * Jennifer Wallace grew up in London and Edinburgh and studied Classics and English at Cambridge University. She now teaches English Literature there, specialising in the Romantic poets and in tragic drama. Research for some of her previous books on Romantic Hellenism and on the archaeological imagination has led her to follow Byron s footsteps through the Pindus mountains on the Albanian/Greek border and to swim into a cave in the Belize jungle, in search of the Mayan entrance to the underworld. She has worked as a freelance journalist for British and American publications on stories ranging from Israel-Palestine to tribal India. She has also played double bass in a jazz quartet. "Digging Up Milton" is Jennifer s first novel. "

'Making Darkness Light is an illumination' Adam Phillips 'His sympathetic yet challenging account will undoubtedly win Milton new readers - and for that a chorus of Hallelujahs' Spectator For most of us John Milton has been consigned to the dusty pantheon of English literature, a grim puritan, sightlessly dictating his great work to an amanuensis, removed from the real world in his contemplation of higher things. But dig a little deeper and you find an extraordinary and complicated human being. Revolutionary and apologist for regicide, writer of propaganda for Cromwell's regime, defender of the English people and passionate European, scholar and lover of music and the arts - Milton was all of these things and more. Making Darkness Light shows how these complexities and contradictions played out in Milton's fascination with oppositions - Heaven and Hell, light and dark, self and other - most famously in his epic poem Paradise Lost. It explores the way such brutal contrasts define us and obscure who we really are, as the author grapples with his own sense of identity and complex relationship with Milton. Retracing Milton's footsteps through seventeenth century London, Tuscany and the Marches, he vividly brings Milton's world to life and takes a fresh look at his key works and ideas around the nature of creativity, time and freedom of expression. He also illustrates the profound influence of Milton's work on writers from William Blake to Virginia Woolf, James Joyce to Jorge Luis Borges. This is a book about Milton, that also speaks to why we read and what happens when we choose over time to let another's life and words enter our own. It will change the way you think about Milton forever.

Dante Alighieri and John Milton, two composers of vernacular epic poems, undoubtedly hold prominent positions in the literary canons of Italy and England respectively. Both authors have been made into universally important icons deeply engrained in the world’s cultural memory; their importance, however, extends vastly beyond their mere literary and political influence. This anthology explores the synchronic and diachronic constructions of Dante and Milton as such culturally produced icons. The main focus of the contributions in this collection is the production of cultural memory regarding Dante and Milton. The juxtaposition and comparison of the two authors invites a broader perspective that goes beyond merely national contexts as it touches on the question of the emergence of a European Dante and a European Milton. At the same time, the comparison of both allows for an exploration of various processes, namely of appropriating, forgetting and side-lining parts of their histories and politics – processes which the works and legacies of both authors have been subjected to throughout their literary and cultural reception.

Seventh-graders Sloane and Amelia are devastated to be paired for a research project about long-lost jewels, but soon they are finding clues hidden for nearly a century--and realize they are being used.

Theatrical Milton brings coherence to the presence of theatre in John Milton through the concept of theatricality. In this book, 'theatricality' identifies a discursive field entailing the rhetorical strategies and effects of framing a given human action, including speech and writing, as an act of theatre. Political and theological cultures in seventeenth-century England developed a treasury of representational resources in order to stage-to satirize and, above all, to de-legitimate-rhetors of politics, religion, and print. At the core of Milton's works is a contradictory relation to theatre that has neither been explained nor properly explored. This book changes the terms of scholarly discussion and discovers how the social structures of theatre afforded Milton resources for poetic and polemical representation and uncovers the precise contours of Milton's interest in theatre and drama.

Includes a literary reflection on Mansfield's work by award-winning novelist Ali Smith. Katherine Mansfield: New Directions brings together leading international scholars to explore and celebrate the modernist short fiction writer, Katherine Mansfield. Reassessing Mansfield's life, work and reputation in the light of new research in literary modernism the book maps new directions for future Mansfield studies in the twenty-first century. Drawing on current work from postcolonial studies, eco-criticism, affect studies, book, periodical and manuscript studies, and auto/biographical and critical-theoretical approaches to her life and art as well as new archival discoveries, this is an essential contribution to our deepening understanding of a central modernist figure.

How does a writer approach a novel about a real person? In this new collection of interviews, authors such as Emma Donoghue, David Ebershoff, David Lodge, Colum McCann, Colm Tóibín, and Olga Tokarczuk sit down with literary scholars to discuss the relationship of history, truth, and fiction. Taken together, these conversations clarify how the biographical novel encourages cross-cultural dialogue, promotes new ways of thinking about history, politics, and social justice, and allows us to journey into the interior world of influential and remarkable people.

This book examines the relationship between literature and religious conflict in seventeenth-century England, showing how literary texts grew out of and addressed the contemporary controversy over ceremonial worship. Examining the meaning and function of religion in seventeenth-century England, Achsah Guibbory shows that the conflicts over religious ceremony that were central to the English Revolution had broad cultural significance. She offers new and original readings of Herbert, Herrick, Browne and Milton in this context.