ABSTRACT

This volume of essays reconfigures the reception history of Milton and his works by bringing to the fore women reading, writing, and rewriting Milton, bringing together in conversation a range of voices from diverse historical, cultural, religious, and social contexts across the globe and through the centuries. The book encompasses a rich range of different literary genres, artistic media, and academic disciplines and draws on the research of established Milton scholars and new Miltonists. Like the female authors and artists whom they explore, the contributors take up a variety of standpoints. As well as revisiting the work of established figures, the volume brings new female creative artists, new subjects, and new approaches to the study of Milton.

chapter |14 pages

Introduction

A Life Beyond Life: Milton’s Afterlives

part I|56 pages

Early Responses by English Women Writers

chapter 1|14 pages

Lucy Hutchinson’s Irrepressible Eve

chapter 2|18 pages

‘Soaring in the High Region of her Fancies’

The Female Poet and the Cosmic Voyage

chapter 3|22 pages

‘Two Great Sexes Animate the World’

Laying the Spectre of ‘Milton’s Bogey’ in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

part II|97 pages

Global Perspectives: Biographies, Translations, Novels, and the Internet

chapter 4|18 pages

The Return of William Wells Brown

A Heroic Black Miltonist in Elizabeth Josephine Brown’s Miltonic Biography of Her Father

chapter 6|15 pages

‘I Am Not “Masculine” I Am Weak’

Ágnes Nemes Nagy’s Translation of Sonnet 23

part |47 pages

II.2 Contemporary Responses

chapter 8|14 pages

From Hell to Paradise

Miltonic Presences in Beatriz Bracher’s Anatomia do Parais

part III|111 pages

Milton through the Female Gaze

chapter 10|11 pages

Beyond Milton’s Daughters

Dorothy Dury, Lady Ranelagh, and the Question of Female Education

chapter 11|16 pages

‘Queer Opening’

Eve’s Readers and Writers

chapter 12|13 pages

The ‘Paradise Within’

A Post-Jungian Revisiting of the Feminine in Milton’s Paradise Lost

part |69 pages

III.2 Milton Visualized: Digital Media, Art, and Performance

chapter 14|39 pages

Other Eyes

Women Artists Rewriting Paradise Lost

chapter 15|11 pages

Women Directing Milton

Feminist Stagings of Miltonic Seduction