Poetics of Mourning

ISBN-13: 9783639172577 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 264 str.

Ph. D. Mark Kelley

Opis

Milton criticism, and especially that of Samson Agonistes, is commonly founded upon two certainties: the certainty of Samsons regeneration, and the certainty of Miltons idealizing Christianity. These platitudes have led too many critics to accommodate Samson (and by implication Milton) into a neo-conservative, predictable, brutally formalistic mold that, instead of challenging, enshrines inherited systems of belief. Euripides, Miltons favorite tragedian, wrote tragedy through his experience of the Peloponnesian War and the resultant fall of the Periclean democratic experiment, a disaster Milton recognized in his own experience of the English civil war. Through war and tragedy Euripides searched the individual and historical boundaries between normality and pathology, locating the source of tragedy in the tense interdependence of opposites: the forces of creation and destruction in ourselves, our societies, our world. This study examines Miltons intellectual and imaginative development in light of Euripidean tragedy, a development that would culminate, achieve its fullest expression, in Miltons last poem Samson Agonistes.

O autorze

Dr. Kelley received his BA from Boston Univ. and
his MPhil and PhD from The Graduate Center, City
Univ. of New York. He has been Adjunct Prof. at Hunter
and Lehman Colleges. Publications include: Milton and
the Grounds of Contention (Duquesne UP, 2003), and Altering
Eyes: New Perspectives on Samson Agonistes (U of Delaware P,
2002).