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Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620-1642

Online ISBN:
9780191740756
Print ISBN:
9780199698707
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Young Milton: The Emerging Author, 1620-1642

Edward Jones (ed.)
Edward Jones
(ed.)
Professor of English, Oklahoma State University
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Published online:
24 January 2013
Published in print:
29 November 2012
Online ISBN:
9780191740756
Print ISBN:
9780199698707
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The experimental and diverse writings of John Milton's early career offer tantalizing evidence of a precocious and steadily ripening author, but critical approaches that contend his juvenilia is self‐consciously designed to chronicle his artistic progression impose an order on work that results more often than not from immediate occasions. In filling a scholarly void regarding Milton's early Latin and English writing (there has been no volume exclusively focused on his writing of the 1620s, 1630s, and the first years of the 1640s), the contributors to this book largely reject the idea of a linear development in favour of achievement of various kinds, unequal in merit, and not predicated upon maturation over time. The literary output for this period has diverse sources—religious holidays; family celebrations; grammar school exercises and university requirements; the deaths of family members, ministers, university officials, and personal friends; aristocratic celebrations and commissions. Such occasionality challenges the argument for the young Milton's uniform progress insofar as this writing includes both Lycidas, one of the most celebrated elegies ever written in English, and The Passion, an unfinished poem declared by its author to involve a subject beyond his grasp. Understanding the accomplishments of Milton's early career requires a grasp of and an attention to the historical, religious, linguistic, educational, and political contexts informing and inspiring creation. This volume features a group of established and emerging scholars whose collective efforts aim to uncover not only Milton's diversity but the degrees of his success.

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