Traditionally, Milton is one of the three great writers, along with Shakespeare and Chaucer, in British literature. His major work, Paradise Lost is considered the greatest epic poem in the English language. Christopher Kendrick's introduction traces both the passion and polemics of Milton criticism throughout history. This volume contains original essays by Carl Freedman, Victoria Silver, William Flesch and John Guillory.

First published in 1987. Milton and Free Will is an incisive, ambitious and comprehensive analysis and defence of the concept of free will, using Milton as an example and exemplar. Written with passion, and out of a lifelong engagement with the poetry of Milton and the philosophical and theological problems it encompasses, the book will illuminate both Milton studies and philosophical debate. The author engages with all the major currents of the free will debate, starting with Aristotle and Aquinas and considering arguments advanced by Hume and Kant as well as those of a number of modern philosophers including Polanyi, Kenny, Parfit, Plantinga, Swinburne, Dennett and Davidson. He pays particular attention to the Marxist formalism of Bakhtin, the Catholic phenomenology of Pope John Paul II and the evolutionism of Monod and Sober. He concludes with a rebuttal of the deconstructionism of Barthes, Derrida and Foucault. He claims that all the major difficulties faced by defenders of free will can be overcome if a notion of willing implicit in the work of Milton is properly understood. Freedom as Milton represented and understood it, he suggests, is a condition of mind arising out of inter-personal awareness and not a property or consequence of practical reasoning. He finds supporting evidence for this view in the writings of Newman and in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, which he reads as a narrative structurally reversing Milton’s representation of the fall of Eve in Paradise Lost. The author systematically analyses and reanalyses key passages in his texts in the light of the many arguments for and against free will, seeking thereby to affirm the validity in principle, and the personal and political importance in practice, of the Christian humanist tradition of which he sees Milton, Newman and the Pope as important (if sometimes misleading) spokesmen.

First published in 1987. Passionately praised and equally passionately criticised by contemporary and later writers, the figure of Milton inherited by the twentieth century is by no means unified, despite the appearance of monumental unity his work sometimes acquires in the classroom and in academic criticism. This collection of essays gathers together disparate and often conflicting representations of Milton as author and cultural figure. Critics familiar with the traditions of Milton scholarship and with debates in literary theory reconstruct Milton from evidence provided by his own prose and poetry, by his contemporaries (including some little-known women writers), by Romantics such as Blake and Wordsworth, and, finally, by a tradition of Afro-American writing that reflects Milton's influence in ways previously unexamined by critics. The process of reconstruction can also be seen as a process of "re-membering." The volume draws inspiration from, but also interrogates, the figure used in Areopagita to describe the quest for truth. Likening Truth to the dismembered body of Osiris, Milton urges Truth's friends to seek up and down, gathering "limb by limb" the body scattered through time and space. Re-membering Milton includes work by established critics from both sides of the Atlantic. Together these contributors place Milton and different Milton traditions firmly within the arenas of modem critical debate. As a result, the collection will be of interest to a wide range of readers: scholars concerned with Milton and Renaissance literature and history; advanced undergraduates and graduate students; researchers in women’s studies; and all readers generally concerned with trends in literary and cultural theory.

Like his compositions, Milton Babbitt's writings about music have exerted an extraordinary influence on postwar music and thinking about music. In essays and public addresses spanning fifty years, Babbitt has grappled profoundly with central questions in the composition and apprehension of music. These writings range from personal memoirs and critical reviews to closely reasoned metatheoretical speculations and technical exegesis. In the history of music theory, there has been only a small handful of figures who have produced work of comparable stature. Taken as a whole, Babbitt's writings are not only an invaluable testimony to his thinking--a priceless primary source for the intellectual and cultural history of the second half of the twentieth century--but also a remarkable achievement in their own right. Prior to this collection, Babbitt's writings were scattered through a wide variety of journals, books, and magazines--many hard to find and some unavailable--and often contained typographical errors and editorial corruptions of various kinds. This volume of almost fifty pieces gathers, corrects, and annotates virtually everything of significance that Babbitt has written. The result is complete, authoritative, and fully accessible--the definitive source of Babbitt's influential ideas.

Collects essays from the economist, providing insights into topics that continue to drive the public debate from health care reform and drug legalization to school vouchers and the economics of John Maynard Keynes.

Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin, first published in 1967, set a new standard for Milton criticism and established its author as one of the world's preeminent Milton scholars. The lifelong engagement begun in that work culminates in this book, the magnum opus of a formidable critic and the definitive statement on Milton for our time. How Milton works "from the inside out" is the foremost concern of Fish's book, which explores the radical effect of Milton's theological convictions on his poetry and prose. For Milton the value of a poem or of any other production derives from the inner worth of its author and not from any external measure of excellence or heroism. Milton's aesthetic, says Fish, is an "aesthetic of testimony": every action, whether verbal or physical, is or should be the action of holding fast to a single saving commitment against the allure of plot, narrative, representation, signs, drama--anything that might be construed as an illegitimate supplement to divine truth. Much of the energy of Milton's writing, according to Fish, comes from the effort to maintain his faith against these temptations, temptations which in any other aesthetic would be seen as the very essence of poetic value. Encountering the great poet on his own terms, engaging his equally distinguished admirers and detractors, this book moves a 300-year debate about the significance of Milton's verse to a new level.