Paradise Lost (Hackett Classics) - Softcover

Milton, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872207331 ISBN 13: 9780872207332

Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2005

Synopsis

Paradise Lost remains as challenging and relevant today as it was in the turbulent intellectual and political environment in which it was written. This edition aims to bring the poem as fully alive to a modern reader as it would have been to Milton's contemporaries. It provides a newly edited text of the 1674 edition of the poem--the last of Milton's lifetime--with carefully modernized spelling and punctuation. Marginal glosses define unfamiliar words, and extensive annotations at the foot of the page clarify Milton's syntax and poetics, and explore the range of literary, biblical, and political allusions that point to his major concerns. David Kastan's lively Introduction considers the central interpretative issues raised by the poem, demonstrating how thoroughly it engaged the most vital--and contested--issues of Milton's time, and which reveal themselves as no less vital, and perhaps no less contested, today.

The edition also includes an essay on the text, a chronology of major events in Milton's life, and a selected bibliography, as well as the first known biography of Milton, written by Edward Phillips in 1694.

About this title

From the Publisher:

This is the first fully-annotated, old-spelling edition of Paradise Lost to be published in this century. It surveys in its introduction and incorporates in its notes the large amount of criticism published between 1965 and the present--not to mention the criticism that began with Dryden, Addison, Samuel Johnson, and William Blake--and it reflects critical perspectives from New Criticism to Deconstruction, from Philology to New Historicism and Feminism. On the page, the book combines the look and feel of original editions with the convenience of wide margins and thorough annotation.

About the Author:

David Scott Kastan is the Old Dominion Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0872207331
• ISBN 13: 9780872207332
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 3
• Number of pages: 512
• Editor: Kastan David Scott