Reading Paradise Lost “This lucid and entirely jargon-free guide to Paradise Lost will help any reader of the poem to find their feet, and to understand what makes it the best poem in the English language. Hopkins has one, and only one, resemblance to Milton’s Satan, which is that he can make intricate seem straight.” Colin Burrow, Oxford University “This is the best introduction to Paradise Lost there is, suitable for the intelligent sixth-former or undergraduate, or the enquiring general reader outside the academy – or indeed anyone who cares about poetry. It is also a joy to read, indeed a real page-turner – and of how many academic books can one say that?” Charles Martindale, Bristol University Concise enough to be assimilated in a single session, this short volume maps the wonders of Milton’s poetic landscape. The book offers an exploration of some of the main narrative and poetic elements of the epic poem – qualities which have compelled and fascinated readers for more than three centuries. The author, a celebrated authority on English poetry of the period, engages with (and attempts to counter) some of the critical arguments that impede readers’ enjoyment of the poem. This volume emphasizes the aesthetic experience of reading Paradise Lost and brings out the pleasure to be derived from one of the great literary achievements of humanity.

The author demonstrates that the apparent contradictions in the poetic, dramatic, and conceptual framework of Paradise Lost are purposive, indeed central, to Milton's kinesthetic poetics.

Originally published in 1890 as part of the "Great Writers" series. Richard Garnett (1835-1906) was Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum and also wrote biographies of Carlyle, Emerson, Gibbon and Coleridge.

Lee Morrissey explores how Milton's major late poems narrate varying responses to modernity: adjustment, avoidance, and antagonism.

Since its publication by Odyssey Press in 1935, Hughes' richly annotated edition -- revised in 1962 -- remains the preferred text of many instructors.

Blanks, Print, Space, and Void in English Renaissance Literature is an inquiry into the empty spaces encountered not just on the pages of printed books in c.1500-1700, but in Renaissance culture more generally. The book argues that print culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries helped to foster the modern idea of the 'gap' (where words, texts, images, and ideas are constructed as missing, lost, withheld, fragmented, or perhaps never devised in the first place). It re-imagines how early modern people reacted not just to printed books and documents of many different kinds, but also how the very idea of emptiness or absence began to be fashioned in a way which still surrounds us. Jonathan Sawday leads the reader through the entire landscape of early modern print culture, discussing topics such as: space and silence; the exploration of the vacuum; the ways in which race and racial identity in early modern England were constructed by the language and technology of print; blackness and whiteness, together with lightness, darkness, and sightlessness; cartography and emptiness; the effect of typography on reading practices; the social spaces of the page; gendered surfaces; hierarchies of information; books of memory; pages constructed as waste or vacant; the genesis of blank forms and early modern bureaucracy; the political and devotional spaces of printed books; the impact of censorship; and the problem posed by texts which lack endings or conclusions. The book itself ends by dwelling on blank or empty pages as a sign of human mortality. Sawday pays close attention to the writings of many of the familiar figures in English Renaissance literary culture - Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, and Milton, for example - as well as introducing readers to a host of lesser-known figures. The book also discusses the work of numerous women writers from the period, including Aphra Behn, Ann Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Lady Jane Gray, Lucy Hutchinson, Æmelia Lanyer, Isabella Whitney, and Lady Mary Wroth.