This volume offers a series of fresh explorations of the life, writing, and reputation of John Milton. The ten papers take us inside Milton's verse and prose, into the context of the events and the intellectual debates within which they were written, and into the later worlds within which his reputation evolved and fluctuated. Key topics discussed include: his political beliefs and career; the characteristics of his poetry - especially Paradise Lost; the literary influences upon his verse; his perception of women; and the ways he has been seen since his death. John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation will be essential reading not only for scholars and students of literature, but for all those interested in Milton's work and reputation over the last four centuries.

John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation (British Academy Original Paperbacks)

Literature & Fiction

Hammond, Paul

Worden, Blair

British & Irish

British Academy

This book examines the ways in which Dryden uses Latin in his poetry and his critical writing, first through quotation and allusion, and second through formal translation. In following the varied traces of Rome in the texture of Dryden's writing, and by emphasizing his continual engagement with mutability and metamorphosis, this book argues the case for Dryden as a thoughtful, humanistic poet.

Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome

Dramas & Plays

Clarendon Press

Paul Hammond explores the representation of sexual relations between men in English literature of the seventeenth century. He includes detailed readings of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and shows how his plays added homosexual elements to his source stories. He also analyses the satirical representation of homosexual kings such as James I and William III, and the homoerotic poetry of Marvell and Rochester.

Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester

Business & Money

Economics

Oxford University Press

Paul Hammond explores the representation of sexual relations between men in English literature of the seventeenth century. He includes detailed readings of Shakespeare's Sonnets, and shows how his plays added homosexual elements to his source stories. He also analyses the satirical representation of homosexual kings such as James I and William III, and the homoerotic poetry of Marvell and Rochester.

Every major poet or philosopher develops their own distinctive semantic field around those terms which matter most to them, or which contribute most profoundly to the imagined world of a particular work. This book explores the specific meanings which Milton develops around key words in Paradise Lost. Some of these are theological or philosophical terms (e.g. 'evil', 'grace', 'reason'); others are words which shape the imagined world of the poem (e.g. 'dark', 'fall', 'within'); yet others are small words or even prefixes which subtly move the argument in new directions (e.g. 'if', 'not', 're-'). Milton seems to expect his readers to be alert to the special semantic field which he creates around such words, often by infusing them with biblical and literary connotations, and activating their etymological roots; alert also to the patterns created by the repetitions of such words, and particularly to their diverse use (and often their blatant misuse) by different characters. To understand the migrations and malleability of key words is part of the education of Milton's reader.

Milton's Complex Words: Essays on the Conceptual Structure of Paradise Lost

History & Criticism

This book reads tragedy as a genre in which the protagonist is estranged from the world around him, and, displaced in time, space, and language, comes to inhabit a milieu which is no longer shared by other characters. This alienation from others also entails a decomposition of the integrity of the individual, which is often seen in tragedy's uncertainty about the protagonists' autonomy: do they act, or do the gods act through them? Where are the boundaries of the self, and the boundaries of the human? After an introductory essay exploring the theatrical and linguistic means by which the protagonist is made to inhabit a strange and singular world, the book devotes essays to plays from classical, renaissance, and neo-classical literature by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Seneca, Shakespeare, and Racine. Close attention is paid to the linguistic strangeness of the texts which is often smoothed over by editors and translators, as it is through the weirdness of tragic language that the deep estrangement of the characters is shown. Accordingly, the Greek, Latin, and French texts are quoted in the originals, with translations added, and attention is paid to textual cruces which illustrate the linguistic and conceptual difficulties of these plays.

The Strangeness of Tragedy

This book is at once an edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets and a guide to how to read these exquisite and complex poems, and is designed both for readers new to the poems and for those who are familiar with the Sonnets but are ready to engage with them afresh. It is the only current edition which provides an original-spelling text of the poems: that is, it prints the poems as they appeared in the first edition, Shake-speares Sonnets (1609), preserving the spelling, punctuation, italics, and capitalization of the original, with only minor interventions where that edition manifestly needs correction. The advantages (and occasional hazards) of reading an original-spelling text are explained, and detailed help is provided in order to assist readers who may be unfamiliar with the conventions of early-modern spelling and punctuation. The introduction focuses on how we might read the poetry, discussing the sonnet form, the tradition within which Shakespeare was writing, and the ways in which readers might explore the richly suggestive language which he used. The forms of sexuality evoked in the Sonnets are fully charted, both in the introduction and the notes, but readers are steered away from biographical speculation. The annotation which accompanies the text of the poems provides detailed and carefully-targeted glosses which set out the likely meanings of the words in order to help the reader construct their own understanding of the poem. The text is followed by appendices on Shakespeare's rhetoric and complex words which will enable the modern reader to appreciate the intricate verbal play of the poetry.

Shakespeare's Sonnets: An Original-Spelling Text

Who are 'the people' in Milton's writing? They figure prominently in his texts from early youth to late maturity, in his poetry and in his prose works; they are invoked as the sovereign power in the state and have the right to overthrow tyrants; they are also, as God's chosen people, the guardians of the true Protestant path against those who would corrupt or destroy the Reformation. They are entrusted with the preservation of liberty in both the secular and the spiritual spheres. And yet Milton is uncomfortably aware that the people are rarely sufficiently moral, pure, intelligent, or energetic to discharge those responsibilities which his political theory and his theology would place upon them. When given the freedom to choose, they too often prefer servitude to freedom. Milton and the People traces the twists and turns of Milton's terminology and rhetoric across the whole range of his writings, in verse and prose, as he grapples with the problem that the people have a calling to which they seem not to be adequate. Indeed, they are often referred to not as 'the people' but as 'the vulgar', as well as 'the rude multitude', 'the rabble', and even as 'scum'. Increasingly his rhetoric imagines that liberty or salvation may lie not with the people but in the hands of a small group or even an individual. An additional thread which runs through this discussion is Milton's own self-image: as he takes responsibility for defining the vocation of the people, and for analysing the causes of their defection from that high calling, his own role comes under scrutiny both from himself and from his enemies.

Milton and the People

The turbulent years of the 1930s were of profound importance in the life of Spanish film director Luis Buñuel (1900–1983). He joined the Surrealist movement in 1929 but by 1932 had renounced it and embraced Communism. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), he played an integral role in disseminating film propaganda in Paris for the Spanish Republican cause. Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929–1939 investigates Buñuel’s commitment to making the politicized documentary Land without Bread (1933) and his key role as an executive producer at Filmófono in Madrid, where he was responsible in 1935–36 for making four commercial features that prefigure his work in Mexico after 1946. As for the republics of France and Spain between which Buñuel shuttled during the 1930s, these became equally embattled as left and right totalitarianisms fought to wrest political power away from a debilitated capitalism. Where it exists, the literature on this crucial decade of the film director’s life is scant and relies on Buñuel’s own self-interested accounts of that complex period. Román Gubern and Paul Hammond have undertaken extensive archival research in Europe and the United States and evaluated Buñuel’s accounts and those of historians and film writers to achieve a portrait of Buñuel’s “Red Years” that abounds in new information.

Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929–1939 (Wisconsin Film Studies)

Biographies & Memoirs

GUBERN,ROMAN

Arts & Literature

University of Wisconsin Press

Upon the pun: Dual meaning in words and pictures

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

W.H.Allen

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hammond, Paul. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Hammond, Paul

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Hammond, Paul. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation (British Academy Original Paperbacks)

Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome

Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester

Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester

Milton's Complex Words: Essays on the Conceptual Structure of Paradise Lost

The Strangeness of Tragedy

Shakespeare's Sonnets: An Original-Spelling Text

Milton and the People

Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929–1939 (Wisconsin Film Studies)

Upon the pun: Dual meaning in words and pictures