Summary
Milton and Sound offers a study of the role played by sound in the writings of English poet and pamphleteer John Milton (1608-1674). Pushing against the mimetic function typically assigned to sound effects in verse following Alexander Pope’s dictum that sound “must seem an echo to the sense,” I engage the critical resources of sound studies, intellectual history, and Renaissance poetic theory to explore the ways in which sound complicates, and at times actively undermines, cognitive and linguistic sense-making. I focus this search in particular on discursive sites where sense-making is mobilized to rationalize controversial topics – topics, that is, around which there was not only a storied lack of social or political consensus in early modern Europe, but a lack of consensus that has dictated national, political, and confessional party lines well into the twenty-first century. This project looks to the concept of sound as a means of disrupting sites of discursive identification, with a special emphasis on identificatory practices that entail or propose identification with the Christian deity.
Read More ↓Edition Statements
- Publication Date:2020
Thesis Information
- Degree:Ph.D.
- University:Harvard University
- Advisor/Supervisor:Teskey, Gordon
- Pages:168
Publication Statements
- Language:eng
- Publication Date:2020
Edition Identifiers
- proquest:2467855582
Subjects
Writers
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