Reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, 5 cr

This class will examine Milton’s long epic poem Paradise Lost in connection with the cultural, social, and historical backgrounds of its time. The course will progressively work through the poem, situating the text in relation to topics such as genre conventions of epic poetry, the historical contexts of the English civil war and its aftermath, political and religious disputes in seventeenth-century Britain, the development of colonialism, and attitudes to sex and gender.