Milton and the Politics of Public Speech

Helen Lynch

doi:10.4324/9781315595467

Milton and the Politics of Public Speech

Helen Lynch

English

Research output: Book/Report › Book

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Using Hannah Arendt’s account of the Greek polis to explain Milton’s fascination with the idea of public speech, this study reveals what is distinctive about his conception of a godly, republican oratory and poetics. The book shows how Milton uses rhetorical theory – its ideas, techniques and image patterns – to dramatise the struggle between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ oratory, and to fashion his own model of divinely inspired public utterance. Connecting his polemical and imaginative writing in new ways, the book discusses the subliminal rhetoric at work in Milton’s political prose and the systematic scrutiny of the power of oratory in his major poetry. By setting Milton in the context of other Civil War polemicists, of classical political theory and its early modern reinterpretations, and of Renaissance writing on rhetoric and poetic language, the book sheds new light on his work across several genres, culminating in an extended Arendtian reading of his ‘Greek’ drama *Samson Agonistes*.

Original language	English
Place of Publication	Farnham, Surrey, UK, and Burlington VT, USA
Publisher	Ashgate
Number of pages	302
Edition	1
ISBN (Electronic)	978-1-4724-1521-9, 978-1-4724-1522-6
ISBN (Print)	978-1-4724-1520-2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315595467
Publication status	Published - 2 Jan 2015

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Helen Lynch 2015.

Keywords

John Milton, Milton poetry, Milton prose, Samson Agonistes, Hannah Arendt, Civil War polemic, rhetoric, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, Lycidas, Comus, cosmetics, embroidery, gardening, imagery, gender, genre, romance Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Isocrates, Cicero Jurgen Habermas, public sphere, politics, Greek polis, Puttenham, Sidney, Peacham, Wilson, Spenser, Hobbes, Tudor rhetoricians, renaissance rhetoric, rhetorical handbooks, renaissance poetics, seventeenth-century language theory, classical oratory, seventeenth-century women’s writing, early modern political oratory, Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Faerie Queene, Jesus, St Paul, Hercules, political theory, classical republicanism, English Civil War, English revolution, Restoration, Commonwealth, Cleopatra, Mark Antony, seventeenth-century pamphlet war
English Literature, Early Modern Literature, Milton studies, Classical and Renaissance Rhetoric, gender studies, women’s studies, cultural history, reception of classical rhetoric in the renaissance, the history of polemic, poetics, history of civil war polemic and seventeenth-century newsbooks, political theory of Hannah Arendt, the public sphere, and genre studies, especially romance.

Access to Document

10.4324/9781315595467

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472415202

Helen Lynch
Person: Academic

Cite this

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Milton and the Politics of Public Speech

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

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Helen Lynch

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