Milton's Uncertain Eden: Understanding Place in Paradise LostThis study describes a variety of ways of thinking about place in the Renaissance and in Paradise Lost. Despite coming from different perspectives, they have in common the idea that the difficulty of the relationship of reciprocity that poetic subjects often expect from their environment destabilizes those subjects' understanding, not only of environment, but of themselves. The study explores destabilization as it affects aspects of the poem from Adam's sense of the landscape of Eden and the meaning of the Fall itself, to the relationship the ambiguous landscapes of Paradise Lost create between Adam and Eve, the poet and the reader; all of whom are struggling to make sense of the same problematically described places. To a surprisingly large extent, the description of prelapsarian Eden and the events that go on within it have in common a failed attempt to understand the nature of the surroundings. In observing the centrality and difficultly of this poetic discourse of place, the problem of place is found at the very heart of the Fall. |
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... argues convincingly that in the Renaissance , the philosophical discussion of place had given way to consid ... argue in these chapters , Milton's descriptions of place work to unite the poem's prelapsarian and postlapsarian sections ...
... argues that this pas- sage " evokes the Eucharist with its fracturing and distributing of the broken body and blood of Christ ” and thus connects " the conscience of the reader , the reformation of the nation , and the text of scripture ...
... argues that the references to classical epic constitute an invitation to consider the Fall " in terms of a failed heroic martyrdom " ( " The Heroic Context of Book IX of Paradise Lost " Journal of English and Germanic Phi- lology 87 ...