Thesiss

John Milton’s Satan from his epic poem Paradise Lost is often read as a complex and sympathetic character, but a villain nonetheless. Here, I will examine how Milton’s Satan not only became a template for the modern atheistic Satanic Ideal, which is outlined by Anton Szandor LaV…

The poetic effectiveness of Milton's God is a fundamental critical issue in Paradise Lost, and the thesis addresses this concern by first surveying the various representations of God contained in the Hebrew scriptures. To speak of the biblical God, one must first understand the …

This thesis examines the genre of epic, and particularly Milton’s Paradise Lost. It argues that it is only in attending to the contextual interactions within Paradise Lost that its full meaning can be comprehended. It demonstrates that the poem not only narrates the Fall, but ac…

European identity (that is Europeans' conception of themselves as European) was formed by the thousand year confrontation from the seventh to the seventeenth century with an aggressive and expansionist Islam. European Christians saw in Islam a symbolic inversion of themselves th…

This dissertation began as a colloquium paper on "Hebraism and Hellenism in Milton's Samson Agonistes ." The question was raised, "Well, just how much Hellenism and how much Hebraism did you find in Samson Agonistes ?" The question for Milton, when he wished to write a drama abo…

In the period before and during the English Revolution, Protestants of all stripes began to claim that the Old Testament pointed not only to the New Testament, but also to the events of their own moment. English reformers began to construct images of self, nation, and history in…