Search Results (7)

This study provides an analysis, text, and translation of satire III.1 from Thomas Naogeorgus’s Satyrarum libri quinque priores (1555), which offers a vivid neo-Latin poetic depiction of the fall of Satan and his followers. It situates Naogeorgus’s work within the tradition of early modern satire and epic, exploring its alignment with theological discourse and its engagement with classical and Biblical motifs. Through a close reading of the text, this article identifies significant thematic and stylistic parallels with John Milton’s Paradise Lost. While acknowledging the limitations of asserting direct literary influence, it highlights Naogeorgus’s unique contributions to the broader literary tradition of Christian epic poetry. The paper calls for greater scholarly attention to Naogeorgus’s oeuvre, emphasizing its value beyond mere comparative analyses, as a distinctive voice in Reformation humanist verse. By providing a translation and commentary, this work aims to promote further studies of neo-Latin literature and its complex interplay with theological and literary traditions. Full article

The medieval epic poem, The Divine Comedy, and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s prestige drama, Westworld, have more in common than at first meets the eye. Both represent hellish and purgatorial geographies, both physical and psychological. And both share the view that what is regularly considered “perfect liberty”, or the liberty to indulge in any and every desire one wishes to with impunity, is in fact a form of slavery, as argued by Aristotle. Both the denizens in Dante’s Inferno and the guests in Westworld’s park, therefore, are ensnared by their own desires. This article will consider the structure of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy and Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s hit HBO show Westworld, which I will argue takes parts of its structure consciously from Dante’s The Divine Comedy. And though at the outset, the two works of art appear dissimilar, the theologically and philosophically infused medieval Catholic-Italian poetry of Dante and the sensuous, nihilistic, and provocative story-telling of Jonathan Nolan’s recent work on the generation and expression of consciousness, ultimately what they share is similarity in structure and an agreement on the connection between activity, suffering, madness, perfection, consciousness, and freedom of the will from sin. Full article

The work of John Milton (both in poetry and prose) offered some striking theological and political innovations in the context of the seventeenth-century upheavals in England. This article aims to show that the work of the English women prophets active in England at the time offers a valid context in which to reassess and re-read Milton’s work. This observation has occasionally been made in relation to specific prophets, but it has not been pursued in any detail. This article examines the concept of “prophecy” itself as formulated by Milton, and establishes its connections to the activity of women prophets; it also explores its connotations in terms of gender and its consequent implications in terms of opening the public and religious space to the work of female authors. It subsequently examines the work of two specific women prophets (Mary Pope and Elizabeth Avery) alongside that of Milton during the years 1647–1649, as offering equally legitimate responses to the debate concerning monarchy at the time, and it ends by examining Milton’s final epic (Paradise Regain’d) as a poetic approach to the concept of female prophecy. The conclusion shows the renewed potential opened by this new research and considers its consequences for the seventeenth-century literary canon. Full article

This article explores the genesis, proliferation, and readership of an understudied genre of religious poetry in early modern Europe. The weeping poem—a devotional literary genre combining elements of epic narrative and Petrarchan lyric that focused specifically on the religious grief of biblical figures—swept across Europe in the forty years around the turn of the seventeenth century. Although this genre was instigated by the Italian Luigi Tansillo’s 1560 Le Lagrime di San Pietro and has often been read as exhibiting a distinctively Counter-Reformation spirituality, our survey of weeping poems uncovers the surprising reach of this genre across multiple languages and even into Protestant England. The range and popularity of this specific kind of weeping poetry across early modern national, linguistic, and confessional lines shows how this constellation of texts transmitted a new form of devotional affect founded on imaginative identification with weeping biblical narrators. In other words, these poems demonstrate how interiority, rather than factional political or theological difference, could be the basis for new emotional communities of worship. Moreover, the relative obscurity of this genre to scholars prompts new questions around the viability of continuing to explore early modern European literary traditions from the perspective of nationalist/linguistic/confessional frameworks. Full article

This article examines two ambitious enactments of the Rama story or Rāmāyaṇa, side by side: the 17th-century painted Mewar Rāmāyaṇa and Vālmīki’s epic poem (ca. 750–500 BCE). Through a formal analysis of two crucial episodes of the tale, it highlights the creative tactics of each medium and stresses their separate aesthetic interests and autonomy. While A. K. Ramanujan’s notion of the “telling” has been immensely influential in South Asian studies to theorize the Rāmāyaṇa’s multiplicity, that concept tends to privilege speech-based embodiments. I propose, by contrast, that ekphrasis may be a more broadly applicable lens. Understanding ekphrasis as an enactment of the Rama story in any medium or in interart media, I advocate for considering poetry and painting on an equal plane as opposed to the standard view of the Mewar paintings as visual translations of linguistic phenomena. Ekphrasis, as a gateway to the maker’s creative process and preoccupations, is central to the paper’s argument, as is the role receivers play in the act of Rāmāyaṇa making. Full article

In a journal entry from 1957, H.D. writes that Adorno’s description of the aging of modernist music might easily apply to the fate of her own work in the post-war period: “Among other fascinating things, he [Adorno] says that Bartók ‘could not quite live up to his own avant-guardism’ [sic] […]. I felt the phrase applied, in a way, to myself and my Helen sequence” (H.D. 2015, p. 40). H.D.’s remark refers to her long poem, Helen in Egypt (1960), which, with its engagement with classical sources and epic themes, seemed to some to be a throwback to an earlier modernist period in which Pound, Joyce, Eliot and H.D. herself had looked to ancient models as a means of reinvigorating modern literature. What did it mean for H.D. to feel that her work had outlived its time, to be a first-generation modernist still writing in that mode after many of her peers and their achievements had passed into history? This article explores H.D.’s sense that her practice was at odds with contemporary demands for poetry to answer to immediate historical concerns. It also considers her case against the critics in letters, notes and in Helen in Egypt which contains its own defense of the relevance of classical modernism to the post-war present day. Full article

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in “New Formalism,” a close attention to textual language and structure that departs from the outdated and regressive stances of old formalisms (especially “New Criticism”) by interrogating the connections between form, history, and culture. This article surveys the contributions of New Formalism to Romanticism studies and applies its techniques to two canonical texts, suggesting that New Formalism is useful both for literary criticism and teaching literature. Opening with a survey of New Formalist theory and practices, and an overview of the theoretical innovations within New Formalism that have been made by Romantic scholars, the article applies New Formalist techniques to William Wordsworth’s Prelude and William Blake’s Milton: a Poem. Often read as poems seeking to escape the dispiriting failure of the French Revolution, these texts, I argue, engage the formal strategies of epic poetry to enter the discourse of the period, offering competing ways to conceive of the self in relation to history. Written during the Romantic epic revival, when more epics were composed than at any other time in history, these poems’ allusive dialogue with Paradise Lost and with the epic tradition more broadly allows them to think through the self’s relationship to the past, a question energized by the Revolution Controversy. I explore how Wordsworth uses allusion to link himself to Milton and ultimately Virgil, both privileging the past and thereby asserting the value of the present as a means of reiterating and restoring it; Blake, in contrast, alludes to Milton to query the very idea of dependence on the past. These readings are intertwined with my experiences of teaching, as I have employed New Formalism to encourage students to develop as writers in response to texts. An emphasis on form provides students with concrete modes of entry into discussing literature and allows instructors to help students identify and revise the forms and structures of their own writing in response to literature. Full article