Milton S Ovidian Eve

Milton's Ovidian Eve presents a fresh and thorough exploration of the classical allusions central to understanding Paradise Lost and to understanding Eve, one of Milton's most complex characters. Mandy Green demonstrates how Milton appropriates narrative structures, verbal echoes, and literary strategies from the Metamorphoses to create a subtle and evolving portrait of Eve. Each chapter examines a different aspect of Eve's mythological figurations. Green traces Eve's development through multiple critical lenses, influenced by theological, ecocritical, and feminist readings. Her analysis is gracefully situated between existing Milton scholarship and close textual readings, and is supported by learned references to seventeenth-century writing about women, the allegorical tradition of Ovidian commentary, hexameral literature, theological contexts and biblical iconography. This detailed scholarly treatment of Eve simultaneously illuminates our understanding of the character, establishes Milton's reading of Ovid as central to his poetic success, and provides a candid synthesis and reconciliation of earlier interpretations.

Milton's Ovidian Eve presents a fresh and thorough exploration of the classical allusions central to understanding Paradise Lost and to understanding Eve, one of Milton's most complex characters. Mandy Green demonstrates how Milton appropriates narrative structures, verbal echoes, and literary strategies from the Metamorphoses to create a subtle and evolving portrait of Eve. Each chapter examines a different aspect of Eve's mythological figurations. Green traces Eve's development through multiple critical lenses, influenced by theological, ecocritical, and feminist readings. Her analysis is gracefully situated between existing Milton scholarship and close textual readings, and is supported by learned references to seventeenth-century writing about women, the allegorical tradition of Ovidian commentary, hexameral literature, theological contexts and biblical iconography. This detailed scholarly treatment of Eve simultaneously illuminates our understanding of the character, establishes Milton's reading of Ovid as central to his poetic success, and provides a candid synthesis and reconciliation of earlier interpretations.

Contributing to our understanding of Ovid, Milton, and more broadly the transmission and transformation of classical traditions, this book examines the ways in which Milton drew on Ovid's oeuvre, and argues that Ovid's revision of the past gave Renaissance writers a model for their own transformation of classical works.

Milton criticism often treats the poet as if he were the last of the Renaissance poets or a visionary prophet who remained misunderstood until he was read by the Romantics. At the same time, literary histories of the period often invoke a Long Eighteenth Century that reaches its climax with the French Revolution or the Reform Bill of 1832. What gets overlooked in such accounts is the rich story of Milton's relationship to his contemporaries and early eighteenth-century heirs. The essays in this collection demonstrate that some of Milton's earliest readers were more perceptive than Romantic and twentieth-century interpreters. The translations, editions, and commentaries produced by early eighteenth century men of letters emerge as the seedbed of modern criticism and the term 'neoclassical' is itself unmasked as an inadequate characterization of the literary criticism and poetry of the period—a period that could brilliantly define a Miltonic sublime, even as it supported and described all the varieties of parody and domestication found in the mock epic and the novel. These essays, which are written by a team of leading Miltonists and scholars of the Restoration and eighteenth century, cover a range of topics—from Milton's early editors and translators to his first theatrical producers; from Miltonic similes in Pope's Iliad to Miltonic echoes in Austen's Pride and Prejudice; from marriage, to slavery, to republicanism, to the heresy of Arianism. What they share in common is a conviction that the early eighteenth century understood Milton and that the Long Restoration cannot be understood without him.

Are the Adam and Eve of Milton's Paradise Lost (1667; 1674) fallen before the Fall? Many readers think so, finding vanity in Eve and intemperate affections in Adam long before they eat the forbidden fruit. But this scholarly study demonstrates that they possess the «fallible perfection» of the Reformation doctrine of Original Righteousness. Read from the perspective of Milton's theological background, Pardise Lost presents human characters who are perfect but fallible, necessarily limited but not fallen until they disobey God.