PoliticalMilton: A New Historicist Reading of Paradise Lost

Abstract

Paradise Lost is a fictional work that portrays the carnal nature of man since the fall. Although the poem is religiously based, Milton takes many liberties with the destructiveness of man’s pride and lust. Milton uses angels and otherworldly characters to reveal the relationships between man, morality, freedom and divinity. Milton justifies the ways of God to man. Justify here means to explain and defend, and ultimately to vindicate, God’s course of action in dealing with Adam and Eve after they succumb to the temptation of Satan and eat forbidden fruit. At the end, Adam and Eve enter the imperfect world with hope; they can yet attain eternal salvation. The papers also describe the significance on political portfolio beyond the historical overview with Milton's perception about hell and heaven. It also analyzes the assumptions of some scholars' who claimed that Milton's translations of Paradise Lost are an epic. Paradise Lost is not, of course, a thinly disguised allegory designed to interpret the tumultuous events of seventeenth century England. Milton's explicit purpose of justifying the ways of God to men leaves little ground for considering the poem to be mainly political. The bare Old Testament story of the creation and the fall hardly afforded scope for a narrative whose ambitious purpose is to justify the ways of God, to men. Although Adam was created superior to Eve and Given "Absolute rule" over her, few, if any, directly political implications are involved in Adams Acquiescing in her wish that he, too, taste of the apple; throughout most of Paradise Lost our first parents live, in the state of innocence and consequently. Like God, are far removed from the world of mundane politics. Key words: Postlapsarian, John Milton, Paradise, Interregnum, ontology, antinomian

Contents

Letter of Recommendation Recommendation of thesis Committee Acknowledgements Abstracts Contents