Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-t9bwh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-15T03:25:55.139Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Body Politics in Paradise Lost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Rachel J. Trubowitz
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

For most readers of Milton's late prose and mature verse, his positive depictions of the human body deeply inform his monism and antimonarchical politics. This essay argues that Milton's perspectives on mind and body are more ambivalent than the critical consensus allows: that the poet equally needs and does not need the body. I demonstrate that Milton's shifting perspectives on mind and body, spirit and flesh, emanate from his opposition to dynastic kingship. They also shape his emerging modern nationalism, which is marked by contradictions and liminality. By focusing on the fallen Adam's soliloquy, I show how Milton's equivocal body politics appropriates and disembodies Hebraic traditions and the concreteness of the Hebraic past (and other histories of others), as well as the very matter of cultural memory. (RJT)

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 121 , Issue 2 , March 2006 , pp. 388 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Achinstein, Sharon. Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.Google Scholar
Augustine. Tractatus adversus Judaeos. Trans. M. Ligouri. Fathers of the Church. Vol. 27. Washington: Catholic U of Amer. P, 1955. 387–414.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. “Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” Bhabha, Nation 291–322.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. “Narrating the Nation.” Introduction. Bhabha, Nation 1–7.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K, ed. Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 1990.Google Scholar
Boyarin, Daniel. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.Google Scholar
Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992.Google Scholar
Cromwell, Oliver. The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Ed. Abbott, Wilbur Cortez. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1945. 4 vols. 1937–47.Google Scholar
Dekker, Thomas. The Whore of Babylon. London, 1607.Google Scholar
Elton, G.R. The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1953.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fallon, Stephen M. Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Forset, Edward. Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Naturall and Politique. London, 1606.Google Scholar
Gregerson, Linda. “Colonials Write the Nation: Spenser, Milton, and England on the Margins.” Rajan and Sauer, Milton 169–90.Google Scholar
Guibbory, Achsah. Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Context in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Haller, William. The Rise of Puritanism; or, The Way to the New Jerusalem As Set Forth in Pulpit and Press from Thomas Cartwright to John Lilburne and John Milton, 1570–1643. New York: Columbia UP, 1938.Google Scholar
Harris, Jonathan Gil. Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern En-gland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.Google Scholar
Hill, Christopher. The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries. New York: Viking, 1984.Google Scholar
Holstun, James. A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
The Holy Bible. London, 1611.Google Scholar
Katz, David S. Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655. London: Clarendon, 1982.Google Scholar
Kendrick, Christopher. Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form. New York: Methuen, 1986.Google Scholar
Kerrigan, William. The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogen-esis of Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Kidd, Colin. British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicities and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994.Google Scholar
Knoppers, Laura Lunger. “Noll's Nose; or, Body Politics in Cromwellian England.” Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Ed. Boesky, Amy and Crane, Mary Thomas. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2000. 21–44.Google Scholar
Loewenstein, David. Milton and the Drama of History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Luxon, Thomas H. “Milton's Wedded Love: Not about Sex (As We Know It).” Milton Studies 40 (2001): 38–60.Google Scholar
Martin, Catherine Gimelli. “The Enclosed Garden and the Apocalypse: Immanent versus Transcendent Time in Milton and Marvell.” Milton and the Ends of Time. Ed. Cummins, Juliet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 144–68.Google Scholar
Martin, Catherine Gimelli. The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.Google Scholar
McEachern, Claire. The Poetics of Nationhood, 1590–1612. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.Google Scholar
McLeod, Bruce. “The ‘Lordly Eye’: Milton and the Strategic Geography of Empire.” Rajan and Sauer, Milton 48–66.Google Scholar
Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Hughes, Merritt Y. New York: Odyssey, 1957.Google Scholar
Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Ed. Wolfe, Don M. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1953–82.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essay in the Sociology of Literary Forms. London: Verso, 1983.Google Scholar
Nairn, Tom. The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neonationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1981.Google Scholar
Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Overton, Richard. An Arrow against All Tyrants. London, 1646.Google Scholar
Philo. “On the Migration of Abraham.” Trans. F.H. Colson and G.H. Whitaker. Loeb Classics Philo. Vol. 4. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960. 133–225.Google Scholar
Pocock, J.G.A. “British History: A Plea for a New Subject.” Journal of Modern History 7 (1975): 601–21.Google Scholar
Rajan, Balachandra. “The Imperial Temptation.” Rajan and Sauer, Milton 294–314.Google Scholar
Rajan, Balachandra, and Sauer, Elizabeth. Introduction. Rajan and Sauer, Milton 1–22.Google Scholar
Rajan, Balachandra, and Sauer, Elizabeth, eds. Milton and the Imperial Vision. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Raymond, Joad. “Complications of Interest: Milton, Scotland, Ireland, and National Identity in 1649.” Review of English Studies 55 (2004): 315–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rogers, John. The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Rosenblatt, Jason P. Torah and Law in Paradise Lost. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Shoulson, Jeffrey S. Milton and the Rabbis: Hebraism, Hellenism, and Christianity. New York: Columbia UP, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Skerpan-Wheeler, Elizabeth. “Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation.” The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I. Ed. Corns, Thomas N. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 122–40.Google Scholar
Smith, Nigel. “Areopagitica: Voicing Contexts, 1643–45.” Politics, Poetry, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose. Ed. Loewenstein, David and Turner, James Grantham. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. 103–22.Google Scholar
Smith, Nigel. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Smith, Nigel. “Popular Republicanism in the 1650s: John Streater's ‘Heroick Mechanicks.‘” Milton and Republicanism. Ed. Armitage, David, Himy, Armand, and Skinner, Quentin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. 137–55.Google Scholar
Stevens, Paul. “‘Leviticus Thinking’ and the Rhetoric of Early Modern Colonialism.” Criticism 35 (1993): 441–61.Google Scholar
Stevens, Paul. “Milton's Janus-Faced Nationalism: Soliloquy, Subject, and the Modern Nation State.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 100 (2001): 247–68.Google Scholar
Streater, John. A Glympse of That Jewel, Judicial, Just Preserving Libertie. London, 1653.Google Scholar
Streater, John. Observations, Historical, Political, and Philosophical, upon Aristotle's First Book of Political Government. London, 1653.Google Scholar
Streater, John. A Shield against the Parthian Dart; or, A Word to the Purpose Shot into Wallingford House…. London, 1659.Google Scholar
Tayler, Edward W. Milton's Poetry: Its Development in Time. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1979.Google Scholar
Teskey, Gordon. Allegory and Violence. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Trubowitz, Rachel J. “Sublime/Pauline: Denying Death in Paradise Lost!' Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton. Ed. Bellamy, Elizabeth Jane, Cheney, Patrick, and Schoenfeldt, Michael. London: Palgrave, 2004. 131–50.Google Scholar
Vane, Henry. A Needful Corrective or Balance in Popular Government. London, 1659.Google Scholar
Walker, William. “Milton's Dualistic Theory of Religious Toleration in A Treatise of Civil Power, Of Christian Doctrine, and Paradise Lost!” Modern Philology 99 (2001): 201–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wildman, John. The Lawes Subversion. London, 1648.Google Scholar
Young, Robert J.C. “The Overwritten Unwritten: Nationalism and Its Doubles in Postcolonial Theory.” The Silent Word: Textual Meaning and the Unwritten. Ed. Young, Young Ban Kah, and Goh, Robbie B.H. Singapore: U of Singapore P, 1998. 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj. They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso, 1991.Google Scholar