Description: This is a history-of-ideas class. John Milton never set foot on American soil…but what if he had? Peter Ackroyd’s novel, Milton in America (1986), imagines precisely this scenario and sees Milton becoming the leader of a Puritan colony. However, perhaps Milton did not even need to be physically present: his ideas, mediated through the Puritans, profoundly shaped American attitudes towards life and religion as well as the plots and preoccupations of American literary texts. It is difficult to imagine Hawthorne, Melville, or Robert Lowell—or even the American Revolution and American attitudes towards such contentious topics as regicide or divorce--without the background of Milton’s thought. Let’s look behind some putatively “American” assumptions and learn about their Miltonic provenance. This seminar can and should be fruitfully combined with Prof. Schindler’s lecture on Milton in the Early Modern English Literature module.
- Enseignant·e: Thomas Austenfeld