Uncircumscribed Mind

Reading Melton Deeply

Edited by CHARLES W. DURHAM and KRISTIN A. PRUITT

The sixteen essays that comprise this collection represent how challenging, stimulating, and far-ranging are the efforts to read Milton critically and deeply. The essays’ subjects and approaches are purposefully diverse, suggesting the variety of topics that engage contemporary readers of Milton’s poetry and prose, but there are, nonetheless, relationships between and among them. In thematic terms, the first six essays deal with the issue of evil, the next two deal with the world of Milton’s masque and the many worlds of his epic Paradise Lost, four examine influence – Milton’s use of his sources or his impact on later writers, and the final four focus on Milton’s later works, one on Milton’s “brief epic” Paradise Regained and three on Samson Agonistes, all suggesting the ambiguity of Milton’s treatment of trial and temptation. Related and yet eclectic in subject matter, approaches, and emphases, the essays demonstrate the rewards of “reading Milton deeply.” Charles W. Durham, past president of the Milton Society of America, is Professor Emeritus of English at Middle Tennessee State University. Kristin A. Pruitt is Professor Emerita of English at Christian Brothers University. Together with Dr. Durham, she co-directs the biennial Conference on John Milton.

During the decade or so surrounding 1540, there is a change in French thinkers’ assumptions about themselves, their country, and their place in the world This evolutionary change is examined from multidisciplinary points of view, providing readers with tools for interpreting, defining, and understanding it in a broader sense The character of the change being explored here is neither rupture nor revolution. It is a displacement of center that contributes to, or in some cases actually creates, a changed relation between past and mid sixteenth-century present as well as...more...

Robert W. Johannsen, professor emeritus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is one of the leading Jacksonian- and Civil War-era historians of his generation IN his honor, eleven of his students have gathered to contribute new essays on the period’s history. On display here are cutting-edge examinations of thought and culture in the late Jacksonian era, new consideration of Manifest Destiny, and fascinating interpretations of the lives of ...more...

Shining and Shadow is an anthology of Yiddish short fiction of the Lower East Side in English translation, representing sixty stories and eight writers with a comprehensive and documented introduction. This latter deals with the earliest period of mass Jewish immigration and concentrates on several main themes: political and social ideals and realities as translated into ideologues and life-relevant personal relationships-all resuming into a definition of culture shock and alienation The anthology focuses on the story as an art form and the short story writer as an artist subject to ...more...

Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, a tenth-century German canoness, wrote two histories and eight sacred stories in Latin verse, as well as six short plays in Latin rhymed prose. These sixteen works are closely analyzed in two major areas of Hrotsvit’s concern-problems of the individual Christian’s moral and spiritual life, and problems of the Christian ruler’s fulfillment of duties and obligations. For Hrotsvit, these areas were united as expressions of the context between flesh and spirit formulated by ST. Paul in his letter to the Galatians: “For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desire is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each ...more...

The annual French XX Bibliography provides the most complete listing available of books, articles, and book reviews concerned with French literature since 1885. Unique in its scope, thoroughness, and reliability of information, it has become an essential...more...

Hinsonville, A Community at the Crossroads, tells the story of a tiny rural community of free black property owners who lived in southeastern Pennsylvania during antebellum times. Just six miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line, this community illustrates...more...

This study argues the thesis that John Donne's poetry, already well-served by the insightful close readings of earlier generations of scholars, can now profit from being read in the context of early modern cultural experience, specifically its visual...more...

This is a collection of eleven essays, laced with humor and irony, on the Dawn of Man, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Hebrews, Minoans and Mycenaens, classical Greece, Alexander the Great, the Hellenistic world, Rome's Republic and Empire, and several church fathers...more...

Pennsylvania's role in the development of American culture and society has received an increasing amount of attention in the past two decades, as the tercentenary celebrations of the founding of the province led to a reexamination of the colony and state's...more...

Susan Howatch's global bestsellers have appeared regularly since the 1970s, but a radical shift in her subject matter in the 1980s and especially the 1990s made reviewers and then academics adjust their glasses and stare hard at her pages. Howatch began...more...

Sherwood Anderson: An American Career is the first critical introduction to this important Midwestern and American writer in over a quarter century. While re- evaluating the accomplishments in Winesburg, Ohio and Anderson's other novels and short stories,...more...

A Saxon canoness in the convent at Gandersheim, Hrotsvit studied and wrote during those decades of the tenth century when Otto the Great was consolidating his rule over Saxony and neighboring German principalities, expanding it eastward into Slavic lands,...more...

This book examines constitutional law and early American politics in the neglected Olmsted case (United States v. Peters). It is the story of a privateering adventure during the American Revolution that ended thirty years later in an armed rebellion...more...

This groundbreaking study demonstrates the profound influence of Ramon Lull (c. 1232?1316?) upon Donne. Albrecht traces Donne's ecumenical vision back to Lull, back to Pico della Mirandola, Lull's disciple, and back to the Jewish cabala, sources for...more...

We Must Have Certainty surveys the development of the genre of the detective story from its origins in the mid-nineteenth century to its current profile in the early twenty-first century. It locates a principal appeal of the genre in the nature of the...more...