John Milton: A Short Introduction (Wiley Blackwell Introductions to Literature)

John Milton: A Short Introduction provides a readable and uncluttered critical account of a complicated and sophisticated author, and his poetry and prose.

Using the still-evolving critical perspectives of the last fifty years, Flannagan puts the mercantile scrivener's son and Cambridge-educated poet Milton under the microscope as a radical social theorist who believed that some monarchs deserved to be deposed or beheaded, if they became tyrants, and who believed in freedom to worship the god of one's conscience, freedom to divorce in an unhappy marriage, and freedom from pre-publication censorship.

Flannagan examines Milton's God as the original father figure, incorporating both genders into one as He gives birth first to Adam and then delivers Eve out of Adam's side. Adam and Eve are the first happy couple and the first couple to argue over questions of authority, to the point where Adam considers divorce and Eve and Adam consider suicide. As the first ecologically fit couple, Adam and Eve begin life living easily within the natural world, but their fall skews Earth's axis and wrecks its delicate balance.

The book will be invaluable for undergraduate and graduate students coming to Milton for the first time and needing an introduction to the man and to his poetry and prose.