Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 The Epic of Gilgamesh
- 2 Greek epic
- 3 Roman epic
- 4 Heroic epic poetry in the Middle Ages
- 5 Dante and the epic of transcendence
- 6 Italian Renaissance epic
- 7 Camões’s Os Lusíadas: the first modern epic
- 8 The Faerie Queene: Britain’s national monument
- 9 The seventeenth-century Protestant English epic
- 10 Mock-heroic and English poetry
- 11 Romantic re-appropriations of the epic
- 12 Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the modern epic
- 13 Derek Walcott’s Omeros
- 14 Epic in translation
- Guide to further reading
- Index
9 - The seventeenth-century Protestant English epic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- 1 The Epic of Gilgamesh
- 2 Greek epic
- 3 Roman epic
- 4 Heroic epic poetry in the Middle Ages
- 5 Dante and the epic of transcendence
- 6 Italian Renaissance epic
- 7 Camões’s Os Lusíadas: the first modern epic
- 8 The Faerie Queene: Britain’s national monument
- 9 The seventeenth-century Protestant English epic
- 10 Mock-heroic and English poetry
- 11 Romantic re-appropriations of the epic
- 12 Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and the modern epic
- 13 Derek Walcott’s Omeros
- 14 Epic in translation
- Guide to further reading
- Index
Summary
During the seventeenth century, the Protestant English epic found its most daring and original expression in Milton's two major epics, Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) and Paradise Regained (1671). In this chapter I examine the generic, political, and religious distinctiveness of the Protestant English epic, especially as it culminated in Milton's epic poems published during the Restoration. This was a period of enormous political and religious hostility and uncertainty for Dissenters like Milton, 'fall'n on evil days' and anxious that his might be 'an age too late' to raise the 'name' of epic to new heights (PL 7.25, 9.44-5). In discussing Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained and the striking ways in which Milton as visionary poet revises and subverts the epic tradition, I will concentrate on what makes them especially distinctive radical Protestant epics. Although Milton's spiritual epics, with their expansive and highly nuanced handling of biblical materials, remain at the centre of this discussion, Lucy Hutchinson's Order and Disorder, another notable biblical epic by a Dissenter committed to republican causes and initially published anonymously in 1679, deserves special attention as well: the first English Protestant epic by a female author, it is only now beginning to receive critical assessment.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Epic , pp. 146 - 166Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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