![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() At the end of the debate, Satan volunteers to corrupt the newly created Earth and God's new and most favoured creation, Mankind. In Pandæmonium, the capital city of Hell, Satan employs his rhetorical skill to organise his followers he is aided by Mammon and Beelzebub. It begins after Satan and the other fallen angels have been defeated and banished to Hell, or, as it is also called in the poem, Tartarus. Milton's story has two narrative arcs, one about Satan ( Lucifer) and the other, Adam and Eve. The poem follows the epic tradition of starting in medias res ( in the midst of things), the background story being recounted later. In later printing, "Arguments" (brief summaries) were inserted at the beginning of each book. However, in the 1674 edition, the text was reorganized into twelve books. In the 1667 version of Paradise Lost, the poem was divided into ten books. He also wrote the epic poem while he was often ill, suffering from gout, and despite suffering emotionally after the early death of his second wife, Katherine Woodcock, in 1658, and the death of their infant daughter. Having gone blind in 1652, Milton wrote Paradise Lost entirely through dictation with the help of amanuenses and friends. Leonard also notes that Milton "did not at first plan to write a biblical epic." Since epics were typically written about heroic kings and queens (and with pagan gods), Milton originally envisioned his epic to be based on a legendary Saxon or British king like the legend of King Arthur. However, parts were almost certainly written earlier, and its roots lie in Milton's earliest youth." Leonard speculates that the English Civil War interrupted Milton's earliest attempts to start his "epic that would encompass all space and time." The biographer John Aubrey (1626–1697) tells us that the poem was begun in about 1658 and finished in about 1663. ![]() In his introduction to the Penguin edition of Paradise Lost, the Milton scholar John Leonard notes, "John Milton was nearly sixty when he published Paradise Lost in 1667. Ultimately, Racial Fictions asserts that race is a crucial analytic lens for reading all early modern English literary texts.Milton Dictating to His Daughter, Henry Fuseli (1794) I make these arguments by reading four canonical early modern texts, three of which are not as strongly associated with race in current scholarship (William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander,” and John Milton’s Paradise Lost). Third, this conception of race as process allows scholars to track race in contexts in which it is not as easily apparent, such as the early modern period when systems of white supremacy are not as coalesced into a set of identifiable oppressive strategies and institutions. Second, examining race as process allows more flexibility to accommodate and explore the ways in which race forms and is formed by other facets of identity, such as gender and sexuality. Making them visible requires finding where they hide: within the language and rhetorical figures in literary texts. The hyper-visibility of these concepts often occludes if not erases the processes and preconditions of their own formations, race being one of them. First, it brings to light the ways in which race undergirds concepts that are central to early modern texts, such as chastity for Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene or universality for John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Examining race more as a process rather than a stable category or relationship opens three important avenues of inquiry. I theorize race in early modern England as the developing process of categorizing, including, excluding, and hierarchizing people based upon historically contingent features that become essentialized through these acts of categorizing and hierarchizing. I argue that race is a more capacious analytic for early modern literary studies. It is only in the past decade that scholarship on race in early modern literary studies has become an urgent topic of conversation, and much of the work has been limited to so called “race texts,” in which characters of color appear. My dissertation, Racial Fictions in Early Modern England, asks how race, co-constituted with gender and sexuality, animates early modern English texts. ![]()
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