Faithful Labourers: a Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667-1970

Download or read book Faithful Labourers: a Reception History of Paradise Lost, 1667-1970 written by John Leonard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-23 with total page 878 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Volume one attends to questions of style and genre. The first three chapters examine the longstanding debate about Milton's grand style and the question of whether it forfeits the native resources of English. Early critics saw Milton as the pre-eminent poet of 'apt Numbers' and 'fit quantity', whose verse is 'apt' in the specific sense of achieving harmony between sound and sense; twentieth-century anti-Miltonists faulted Milton for divorcing sound from sense; late twentieth-century theorists have denied the possibility that sound can 'enact' sense. These are extreme changes of critical perception, and yet the story of how they came about has never been told. These chronological chapters explain the roots of these changes and, in doing so, engage with the enduring theoretical question of whether it is possible for sound to enact sense"--