Paradise Lost has excited and provoked poets and critics for over 300 years. This introduction provides an accessible route into Milton's influential epic poem, guiding students through each of the twelve books by a combination of close textual analysis and summary of key themes and techniques. Without assuming prior knowledge, Nutt helps navigate the book's biblical and classical background and its relationship to seventeenth-century history. Focusing on developing the reading skills needed to approach this important and complex poem independently, A Guide to Paradise Lost is essential reading for all students of Milton.

This handbook of English Renaissance literature serves as a reference for both students and scholars, introducing recent debates and developments in early modern studies. Using new theoretical perspectives and methodological tools, the volume offers exemplary close readings of canonical and less well-known texts from all significant genres between c. 1480 and 1660. Its systematic chapters address questions about editing Renaissance texts, the role of translation, theatre and drama, life-writing, science, travel and migration, and women as writers, readers and patrons. The book will be of particular interest to those wishing to expand their knowledge of the early modern period beyond Shakespeare.

This Handbook presents a comprehensive introduction and thirty-seven new analytical essays on the issues, contexts, and texts of the English Revolution. Offering textual, literary critical, historical, and methodological information, the volume exemplifies new and diverse approaches to revolutionary writing and maps out future avenues of research.

Four hundred years after his birth, John Milton remains one of the greatest and most controversial figures in English literature. The Oxford Handbook of Milton is a comprehensive guide to the state of Milton studies in the early twenty-first century, bringing together an international team of thirty-five leading scholars in one volume. The rise of critical interest in Milton's political and religious ideas is the most striking aspect of Milton studies in recent times, a consequence in great part of the increasingly fluid relations between literary and historical study. The Oxford Handbook both embodies the interest in Milton's political and religious contexts in the last generation and seeks to inaugurate a new phase in Milton studies through closer integration of the poetry and prose. There are eight essays on various aspects of Paradise Lost, ranging from its classical background and poetic form to its heretical theology and representation of God. There are sections devoted both to the shorter poems, including 'Lycidas' and Comus, and the final poems, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. There are also three sections on Milton's prose: the early controversial works on church government, divorce, and toleration, including Areopagitica; the regicide and republican prose of 1649-1660, the period during which he served as the chief propagandist for the English Commonwealth and Cromwell's Protectorate, and the various writings on education, history, and theology. The opening essays explore what we know about Milton's biography and what it might tell us; the final essays offer interpretations of aspects of Milton's massive influence on later writers, including the Romantic poets.

A defining volume of essays in which leading international scholars apply an interdisciplinary approach to the long and evolving relationship between English Literature and Theology.

In the most comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the poetry published in Britain between the Restoration and the end of the eighteenth century, forty-four authorities from six countries survey the poetry of the age in all its richness and diversity—serious and satirical, public and private, by men and women, nobles and peasants, whether published in deluxe editions or sung on the streets. The contributors discuss poems in social contexts, poetic identities, poetic subjects, poetic form, poetic genres, poetic devices, and criticism. Even experts in eighteenth-century poetry will see familiar poems from new angles, and all readers will encounter poems they've never read before. The book is not a chronologically organized literary history, nor an encyclopaedia, nor a collection of thematically related essays; rather it is an attempt to provide a systematic overview of these poetic works, and to restore it to a position of centrality in modern criticism.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE HANDBOOK “Never a dull read, Marshall Grossman’s elegant volume bristles with sharp ideas to inform, stimulate and challenge his audience.” Thomas Corns, Bangor University The seventeenth century was a dramatic period in British history, witnessing two revolutions, huge constitutional change, the widening of the political and literary classes, and the gradual acceptance of women as authors. This easy-to-use Handbook offers readers a succinct overview of this complex period, guiding them through the principal literary works, figures and innovations of the time. Focusing on studying texts in context, Marshall Grossman explores the ways in which major works, including Hamlet, Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim’s Progress, both reflected and helped to shape the history of the time, while concise sections on topics such as the Gunpowder Plot and the Pamphlet Wars allow the reader to engage more fully with the central themes and preoccupations of the period. Concluding with a series of brief biographical profiles describing the life and works of the century’s most significant and influential writers, The Seventeenth-Century Literature Handbook is essential reading for anyone interested in British Literature across the civil war and restoration periods.

The Bible was, by any measure, the most important book in early modern England. It preoccupied the scholarship of the era, and suffused the idioms of literature and speech. Political ideas rode on its interpretation and deployed its terms. It was intricately related to the project of natural philosophy. And it was central to daily life at all levels of society from parliamentarian to preacher, from the 'boy that driveth the plough', famously invoked by Tyndale, to women across the social scale. It circulated in texts ranging from elaborate folios to cheap catechisms; it was mediated in numerous forms, as pictures, songs, and embroideries, and as proverbs, commonplaces, and quotations. Bringing together leading scholars from a range of fields, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, 1530-1700 explores how the scriptures served as a generative motor for ideas, and a resource for creative and political thought, as well as for domestic and devotional life. Sections tackle the knotty issues of translation, the rich range of early modern biblical scholarship, Bible dissemination and circulation, the changing political uses of the Bible, literary appropriations and responses, and the reception of the text across a range of contexts and media. Where existing scholarship focuses, typically, on Tyndale and the King James Bible of 1611, The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in England, 1530-1700 goes further, tracing the vibrant and shifting landscape of biblical culture in the two centuries following the Reformation.