The End of Learning (Studies in Major Literary Authors)

Festa, Thomas

ISBN 10: 041576291X / ISBN 13: 9780415762915

Published by Routledge, 2014

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9780415762915

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The End of Learning (Studies in Major Literary Authors)
• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 041576291X
• ISBN 13: 9780415762915
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

This book shows that education constitutes the central metaphor of John Milton's political as well as his poetic writing. Demonstrating how Milton's theory of education emerged from his own practices as a reader and teacher, this book analyzes for the first time the relationship between Milton's own material habits as a reader and his theory of the power of books. Milton's instincts for pedagogy, and the habits of inculcation everywhere visible in his writings, take on a larger political function in his use of education as a trope for the transmission of intellectual history. The book therefore analyzes Paradise Lost in the complementary contexts of its outright educational claims and more subversive countervailing measures in order to show how Milton dramatizes "the end of learning," which is to say both its objective and its failure. The thesis emphasizes the argumentative resourcefulness of Milton's efforts to liberate readers from the tyrannical bonds of their political innocence, most immediately in the context of the failure of Cromwell's regime to establish lasting republican institutions. More philosophically, the book explores the ways in which Milton's works investigate the humane and intellectual yearning for justice in response to the problem of evil.

About the Author

Thomas Festa is Assistant Professor of Renaissance literature in the English department at the State University of New York at New Paltz. His essays have appeared in Milton Studies, English Language Notes,Reformation, the John Donne Journal, and The OxfordEncyclopedia of British Literature.