In our contemporary Western culture, "freedom" is a powerful term with elastic meanings and contradictory uses; it has both driven rebellion and justified empire. John Milton's world, like our own, struggled to understand freedom within what was already considered a heritage of political and personal liberty, compounded in the seventeenth century by theological questions of freedom. In this important new study, Susanne Woods reveals Milton's central place in the evolution both of ideas of freedom in English-speaking culture and in creating a poetics that invites readers to enact the freedom...
In our contemporary Western culture, "freedom" is a powerful term with elastic meanings and contradictory uses; it has both driven rebellion and justi...
