Subject code
ENGL
Course Number
331M
Course Long Title
Renaissance Literature
Course Description
Milton's Paradise Lost undertakes in epic form the entire Christian story of the creation, the fall, the banishment, and the redemption of the human race. Its reliance on many kinds of other texts - Greek epics, Genesis, the whole of medieval and Renaissance iconography of temptation - demands that we read it in multiple contexts. The poem dramatizes the central conflicts of heaven and earth by means of rhetorical debate. We will watch the construction of the various voices as the tale unfolds. In studying the verse itself we will see how Milton gives it the monumental proportions of his subject. In addition, we will explore visual depictions that narrate the creation, temptation, and fall as they appear in frescoes, mosaics, book illumination, bronzes, and stonework from the 6th through the 16th centuries.
Credit Type
Institutional
Instructional Method Name
Seminar